From Modest to Mighty: How Lorraine Ball Transformed a 250-Subscriber Email List into 10,000 Strong

Jennie Wright [00:00:03]:

Hi. This is the Acquire podcast from the Odd Phonic Podcast Network, and I’m Jenny Wright. This podcast dives deep into the world of list building, lead generation, and launches, and it’s completely designed to empower entrepreneurs and marketers with the knowledge and strategies to master these essential business growth tactics. And I’m really thrilled today because we have a true marketing maven, and her name is Lorraine Ball. After escaping the corporate confines to pursue her passion for empowering small business owners, Lorraine has become a successful entrepreneur, author, and professional speaker. She’s a beacon of marketing wisdom. She shares a knowledge with audiences from college classrooms to her own podcast called More Than A Few Words. I’ve been a guest on that podcast.

Jennie Wright [00:00:51]:

When she’s not diving into the world of marketing, you can often find Lorraine capturing the beauty of her travels through her camera lens and just enjoying life. And I recently found out she just celebrated 45 years of marriage, and I think that’s amazing. So congratulations. And today, Lorraine is here to unravel the remarkable Success story of one of her clients, Randall beans. So as I understand it, we’re gonna get into this. Randall beans is a manufacturer of beans In glass jars, well established company, we’re talking 75 plus years, maybe up to a 100 years. And this story is all about you transform their very modest email list of 250 into an email powerhouse with over 10,000 subscribers. This is a huge feat, and you’ve accomplished this through a ton of innovative strategies offering digital recipe collections and downloads.

Jennie Wright [00:01:40]:

Let’s get into that. I’m really excited about that piece and curating custom recipes with the help of some dedicated recipe developers. So a decade later, Randy, Randall beans continues to enjoy a Staggering 30% open rate. That is amazing, and the list keeps growing. So, Lorraine, I’m so excited to delve into the specifics of this. Thanks so much for joining.

Lorraine Ball [00:02:00]:

It’s so nice to be here. And I love talking about Randall Beanes because they were a very, very long time client and certainly one of my favorites. And I like them in general, and I loved the success that we were able to create for them.

Jennie Wright [00:02:13]:

Absolutely. And I know that was a long intro, but I needed to sort of set The tone and the lay of the land because I love getting into case studies. This is one of the reasons why this podcast is has come about between my partner and I. We were just like, Wouldn’t it be great to tell these kinds of stories? So can you walk us through the initial stages of transforming Randall Bean’s email list from 250 to 10,000? Mhmm. What were the key strategies? What created that substantial growth? What was the timeline like? Just sort of fill in the gaps.

Lorraine Ball [00:02:45]:

So The first thing that you have to understand is this was a very established company. They’ve been doing very, very traditional marketing. And As we came on, they really were looking for us to modernize, to update their image because the biggest challenge they were facing was their tar their clients, whether it was their Target or not. The people that bought Randall Beams were Late sixties and older. Mhmm. They were primarily the Walmart shoppers, discount grocers, which had sustained them for a generation. But that generation was dying off. Yeah.

Lorraine Ball [00:03:23]:

And there was an entire market that existed with huge potential that they were not reaching. And so that was kind of the setup. And What we did is exactly, I think, what you need to do in any situation is really looked at who do they wanna attract And what are the stumbling blocks? Why don’t they buy this product now? And the consumers that we decided to target were really Young moms. We figured we’d deal with the people in the middle later, but we wanted those young moms, lower income, Busy moms, 2 2 families trying to create affordable, nutritious meals, But the problem was that they didn’t think about beans. They didn’t they didn’t know any bean recipes, or they knew one. The 3 bean salad that everybody brought to the picnic

Jennie Wright [00:04:20]:

Or chili.

Lorraine Ball [00:04:21]:

Or chili. But they really didn’t know what to do with the beans. And so with that in mind, we were Like, okay. What can we do? Well, the funny thing was Randall Beanes had produced a cookbook 30 years ago. Mhmm. And we were like, this is great. We took every recipe and we turned it into a blog post, and that was really step number 1 was creating Some initial content. And we found some new photographs.

Lorraine Ball [00:04:51]:

Recipes. Sometimes the owner of Randall beans, Meredith, loved to cook, so she would make the recipe and we’d get these new photos, and that was the first step. And we started sharing that on social media. We started getting some good feedback, and we thought, you know, I bet people would trade their email address for a recipe collection. Because we know and this was we’re going back maybe I wanna say this was 2010. To that in that time frame. So inbound marketing was in its early stages, but what we were already seeing was if you created Valuable content. Mhmm.

Lorraine Ball [00:05:32]:

And you promoted it. Even if that content was available on your website as individual posts, That collection had value, the convenience of the collection. And so we Copy those recipes into it. Honestly, into a Microsoft Word document. We created a pretty cover, a table of contents, Saved it as a PDF and built a landing page. And the landing page just talked about The 10 or 12 of Randall Bean’s favorite recipes, and they were pretty basic. But as we started to promote that, it worked. We saw people giving us their email address in exchange for the recipe collection.

Lorraine Ball [00:06:22]:

So then the next thing that we did is we started emailing them, and We didn’t have a lot of other content, but the other trick about downloads, people download stuff from your website, And then they don’t read it. You know?

Jennie Wright [00:06:41]:

We All the time. All the time.

Lorraine Ball [00:06:43]:

You know, they sign up for courses. They they don’t read it. But there was that original moment where they were interested. They really did want that info. So the first 10 emails we sent With the same 10 recipes. Mhmm. It was okay. People were like, oh, this is cool.

Lorraine Ball [00:07:02]:

Yeah. This is great. Oh, I haven’t made this yet.

Jennie Wright [00:07:04]:

Mhmm.

Lorraine Ball [00:07:05]:

And some of the early posts on the Facebook page were, hey. If you make this recipe, Go ahead and and share a comment or, take a photo. And as soon as that started working, we were like, okay. We need more recipes. Oh, wow. Yeah. And we started collecting recipes. We started diving into our our own cookbooks And, crediting where we got the recipes from.

Lorraine Ball [00:07:33]:

So we we did not, pretend these were our recipes, But we were like, hey. We found this great recipe on epicurean.com. Mhmm. And we we started sharing some of those recipes and started some of those in the newsletter even while we just kept promoting this original cookbook. And what we started to see was in addition to the basic recipes, some of these really out there recipes that we had found links to were popular, and people were were really responding well. So paying attention to The engagement and the interaction really helped. Mhmm. And then the next step was, well, Maybe we could come up with some of our own recipes.

Lorraine Ball [00:08:20]:

Now I gotta tell you, not a chef. I mean, I’m a better I’m a better cook now because I have more time, but 10 years ago, running a business, still dealing with kids at home, Experimenting with recipes was not my thing.

Jennie Wright [00:08:36]:

Okay.

Lorraine Ball [00:08:37]:

But we connected with there were some, there were some local people that we knew that were, were foodies and were recipe developers. Meredith knew some people, and we reached out. And we’re like, hey. Will you create 1 to 2 recipes a month for us? Mhmm. And The recipes were awesome. And if you get the right recipe developer and and, of course, this is a niche business, but you’ve gotta have somebody Who actually understands ingredients and can take good photos. Because those 2 things You know, when you’re

Jennie Wright [00:09:13]:

They’re not mutually exclusive to each other. They’re not the same.

Lorraine Ball [00:09:17]:

Yeah. No. We had a recipe developer. Her recipes were wonderful. Her photos, I I couldn’t use them.

Jennie Wright [00:09:23]:

Yeah.

Lorraine Ball [00:09:24]:

And in food marketing and it I mean, it’s all about the pictures. You know, this was the time when You started to see a lot of tasty videos and, you know, the the food demos and stuff and just

Jennie Wright [00:09:37]:

Who didn’t see those tasty videos?

Lorraine Ball [00:09:39]:

Yeah. Oh, they were every they were everywhere. And so people were really responding at that time Mhmm. To food photos and to food videos. And we hadn’t gotten to the video stage yet, but we specifically did this recipe collection. We we had these people doing a bunch of different recipes, and then after a while, we were like, you know what? We’ve got a bunch of chili recipes, And everybody loves chili, so we did a chili cookbook. And then that one did well. And We just kept adding.

Lorraine Ball [00:10:12]:

Initially, it was quarterly. Mhmm. You know, every 3 months, we would put together a new collection. We didn’t abandon the old collection because that was the other thing was we would alternate in social media and in advertising Promoting 1 versus the other. The big really big boost To the brand came when we did some very targeted Facebook advertising Because our our customers our customers’ customers Yep. You know, Randall’s customers, they were on Facebook. That’s that’s where they were hanging out.

Jennie Wright [00:10:52]:

Right.

Lorraine Ball [00:10:53]:

And so we did Facebook advertising And promoted the cookbooks. That’s what we put the money behind.

Jennie Wright [00:11:01]:

Yeah.

Lorraine Ball [00:11:01]:

So traffic to the cookbook page And people signed up. I think it took us about I wanna say it might have been about 18 months to 2 years to get All the way to that 10,000. It didn’t happen. That’s not bad. Did not.

Jennie Wright [00:11:24]:

But how much did you how much of that time did you have to invest into ads? Because, You know, you can post on social media till all you know, for all your heart’s content, but unless something catches, you’re not gonna get that growth on social and then getting them off of social into your email list. Obviously, using Facebook ads created a boost for you. Mhmm. Were you guys running ads that whole time?

Lorraine Ball [00:11:49]:

So we actually had a fairly small ad budget, and the budget that we had again, Some of it is time frame. You you you need to understand the rules of the game were different 10 years ago than they are now. Of course. Okay.

Jennie Wright [00:12:06]:

Of course. And they were cheaper.

Lorraine Ball [00:12:07]:

And they the ads were cheaper. There was less competition. Also, You could do more with organic social. You really you were still getting lift on organic social. So It was a very modest it was a very modest budget, and, it really Maybe $200 a month. I you you could not do that to

Jennie Wright [00:12:33]:

have got to be kidding me.

Lorraine Ball [00:12:35]:

Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. You could Oh

Jennie Wright [00:12:37]:

my gosh.

Lorraine Ball [00:12:38]:

Again, you could you you you would have to you you’d have to be in the 5, 600 or more range today. But in that time frame

Jennie Wright [00:12:48]:

Yeah. It worked.

Lorraine Ball [00:12:50]:

It worked. And, also, that was a lot that I I mean, it it it sounds silly. It’s not like it’s, you know, A century ago, but the idea that you were spending $200 a month on Facebook ads in 2010, 2011, That was a lot because people still thought of social media as free. The other thing that we did was we aggressively cross promote it.

Jennie Wright [00:13:18]:

Okay.

Lorraine Ball [00:13:19]:

So What’d that look like? We had well, we had all of our recipe developers. They were always promoting, hey. I have a new Randall beans recipe. I just launched a new recipe. So we would tag them. They would tag us. And so we got introduced to their audiences and their communities.

Jennie Wright [00:13:36]:

Mhmm.

Lorraine Ball [00:13:36]:

And that opened up This this really different category for us because the the recipe developers, most of them were not Really young moms. They were a little bit older, little bit more affluent. So when they promoted our recipes on Their personal pages, we were getting introduced to a a really different demographic. We were getting introduced to maybe more professional people. We were getting introduced to more singles, and The message was always the same. Randall beans is easy and delicious. It’s Mhmm. You know, we we could start and so the recipes became More interesting, more engaging.

Lorraine Ball [00:14:24]:

In between that, we also did a lot of brand personality.

Jennie Wright [00:14:29]:

Right.

Lorraine Ball [00:14:30]:

Because Rambler Bean was a family owned business. Mhmm. And so in addition to all of these recipes, there were the people behind the brand, Scott and Meredith and their kids. And this was a business she inherited from her father. Yep. And so they were To keep the Facebook page interesting, not only did we do recipe, recipe, recipe, we did the human interest stories. And I think that’s one of the things that people forget about Mhmm. When they’re doing lead gen is In between, you gotta give people other things.

Lorraine Ball [00:15:07]:

You’ve gotta give them other reasons to stay connected and follow you. And so, you know, Meredith went to the local state fair and was, you know, in a pig chasing contest, and that video blew up. And then, you know, Meredith, what do you eat after the pig chasing contest? Well, you know, we had a nice salad with the white beans. Yeah.

Jennie Wright [00:15:29]:

Got it. Did you ever attract or did you ever go after a vegetarian or a vegan audience with this? Did you get so specific?

Lorraine Ball [00:15:37]:

We did. We actually, one of the other things that started to happen as as, is they were having a lot of success in visibility. They were getting into new retail outlets. They also their product line and had one of their, one of their white beans actually certified as, organic. And so that kinda created this idea of, hey. What if we do vegan? And, honestly, we went back through a lot of our recipes that we already had and just created a new collection. The more recipes we created, The more we could mix and match Mhmm.

Jennie Wright [00:16:18]:

And

Lorraine Ball [00:16:18]:

pull in as long as it wasn’t exactly the same recipes, you know, it was like, okay. Well, there’s 2 from the Chili Cookbook and 2 from this cookbook. So we did the, we did, we did a very, very successful vegan cookbook, And, that was really a lot of fun. We also did a, we did a dad’s cookbook, specific we always would run that one once we kinda got up and running with them, Like in the September, October, kind of dad’s night to cook. You know, back to school. Mom’s got stuck. Hey. Okay.

Jennie Wright [00:16:58]:

I know. I know. I know. I know.

Lorraine Ball [00:17:00]:

But but it worked. It you know, that was one of our most popular cookbooks was The dad recipes. Good. You know,

Jennie Wright [00:17:09]:

the I’m glad.

Lorraine Ball [00:17:09]:

The easy little bit macho, kind of fun, maybe maybe more meat than we put in some of the others. I it Yeah.

Jennie Wright [00:17:17]:

Just playing to the audience. I I totally get it. It’s

Lorraine Ball [00:17:21]:

And and, so then we we had all of these recipes. I mean, we had a lot of recipes. And then we were like, well, you know, we’re sending out the newsletter once a month for the regular audience. There are people that maybe would like a recipe a week. Mhmm. So we actually switched the promotion from the individual cookbooks Mhmm. And created a campaign around the recipe of the week.

Jennie Wright [00:17:53]:

And on their website now, it looks like they’ve gone to a monthly selection.

Lorraine Ball [00:17:57]:

Yes.

Jennie Wright [00:17:57]:

So they’re doing that a little bit different. I’ve been on their website a little bit today, just checking things out and whatnot. So, I wanna pull back a little bit. These are there’s a lot of concepts that you’re talking about with Randall beans, and I want to try and talk about this from a little bit more of a digital perspective slash the generation and so on. Right? A lot of the people that might be listening to this have a digital business. Email marketing is super important. We have lessons we can learn from Randall beans. And I think I’d like to sort of pull those out as we sort of get to the wrap up time of what we’re talking about here.

Jennie Wright [00:18:35]:

Let I’d love your opinion or your thoughts on how the lessons that you put into play and the strategies that you did with Randall beans, could be applied, in now times, not 2010, but, like, 2023, where the market has changed and the Ads have changed and organic has changed and the algorithms have changed. We’ve got more platforms and so on. How can we apply these lessons?

Lorraine Ball [00:19:00]:

So the first thing the first lesson, I think, has been true throughout my entire career well before digital through this Early stages of inbound and even today, and that’s number 1. Figure out who you wanna reach and what really is their problem. What Questions do they have? For us, it was, I don’t know how to use Randall beads. You, whatever it is you’re selling, you know those questions, and make sure you’ve got good answers. And create those initial offers And those initial landing pages around answering those questions and those needs. So that’s definitely number 1.

Jennie Wright [00:19:42]:

Mhmm.

Lorraine Ball [00:19:43]:

Number 2 is go for a slice of the audience. We were successful because we were laser focused On a very tight niche. We knew other people would be interested. And over time, as we built that 1st audience. We expanded. We expanded with more upscale recipes. We expanded with the dad recipes. But we did not go wide Until we were very deep and really covered the needs of that market and clearly established that we didn’t just sell beans, but we sold a way to cook beans and and that.

Jennie Wright [00:20:24]:

Now I wanna interject for just one second about the going wide after you go deep. Mhmm. There’s, And I learned this the hard way. Mhmm. I think a lot of people do. Back when I started, there was no conversation about niching in, and I started in mid 2012. Mhmm. People in general were not speaking about this at the level that they should have, and I think it created or at least the people I was listening to at the time.

Jennie Wright [00:20:52]:

Mhmm. And I think it created such a disparity between what we were trying to achieve as new business owners and what was actually happening. And had I niched in early, I and I wish I had, things would have, I think, been drastically different. And instead, I was told that everybody was my potential client. All I had to do was speak to their different problems, and I could have, you know, and I and I could do I could do all of this stuff, and it was disastrous. Absolutely. Every time I sent an email, I’d have 30, 40, 50, 60 unsubscribes Mhmm. Which is ridiculous.

Jennie Wright [00:21:26]:

And I was and I talked about this actually in a in a previous episode. I actually was sending emails to my entire list even though it was targeted to one thing. So the people who had come in from something very, you know, very different We’re like, the heck am I getting an email about this for? So there’s there’s a lesson here in the going deep before going wide, and and I think we need people to understand or we need Stan, or we need to maybe drill at home a bit more sometimes that Oh, absolute going deep.

Lorraine Ball [00:21:56]:

Absolutely. You know, I teach, I teach marketing at a local university and and, the example I always give my students is thinking about Coke. Coke has a huge budget. They can reach everybody if they wanted to, but they know that I’m never gonna drink Coke. In a world with chocolate, I’m not spending a 150 calories On Coke. And so they don’t spend any resources trying to convince middle aged women to drink Coke. They promote Diet Coke. They promote, you know, Dasani water.

Lorraine Ball [00:22:27]:

They promote other products. If you don’t have the range to promote a bunch of different products, You gotta take the lesson that I’m gonna be really good and really meaningful.

Jennie Wright [00:22:39]:

Mhmm.

Lorraine Ball [00:22:40]:

The other example is Lava Soap. It’s, you know, blue collar guys working on cars. My friend Denise likes to work on cars. She does not fit their demographic, But she will find them. They should not look for her. And the same is true in digital marketing. If you say you specialize in, specifically list building campaigns for service businesses. I have a retail store and I like what you’re doing.

Lorraine Ball [00:23:09]:

I’m gonna pick up the phone and call you or send you a note. Yeah. But you should not spend any time looking for me.

Jennie Wright [00:23:16]:

Agreed. Agreed. And You obviously helped change the landscape for them. Yes. And based on their website, They’re still using and employing a multitude of the strategies that you’ve talked about. Mhmm. And, you know, I I even signed up for their newsletter to see what it was like. Obviously, I do my research before we do these episodes, and the, you know, the email campaign that came through was Really good, actually.

Jennie Wright [00:23:44]:

And, we I unfortunately, we don’t get Randall’s beans up here in Canada. It’s only in the states. I Check that out as well. So sorry for the Canadian listeners. But if you’re in the States, there’s, like, a whole list under their FAQ where you can find these things. This is not a commercial for them. But Yep. For the strategies that were employed, I wanted to check out their email marketing.

Jennie Wright [00:24:03]:

It does look really, really great, and I can understand why their rate would have been 30%. I wonder what it is now.

Lorraine Ball [00:24:11]:

You know, we, a a full confession, I sold my agency 2 years ago. And so All the way from when we started working with them in 2010 until 2021, they stayed our customer, which in this business I said what? If you’re running a digital agency, in this business, 10, 11 years with a client is really remarkable. It is. And, I was really excited because and I and I still talk to the owner every now and then, and I was really excited When she was talking about the the new agency that they hired and the work this new agency is doing and how much it really lines up exactly With all the things that we taught them. And Well, there’s really nothing

Jennie Wright [00:24:56]:

different like, Lauren, there’s really nothing different in the, fun fundamentals. Mhmm. The fundamentals are always the same. This is why I I still have a job After 11 years Mhmm. List building will always need to happen. Lead generation is continuous. And launching or trying to get product in front of your ideal client and so on and so forth. Those ideas don’t change.

Jennie Wright [00:25:21]:

It’s just the delivery, and it all is quite minute changes. It’s It’s really not, it’s not a one eighty. Mhmm. It’s like a 10 degree here or a 3 degree here. And That may you know, I want people to understand that when you when you learn the basics, you can then elevate on the basics. And I think that’s just This is a great story that talks about how to use those same, you know, strategies over a longer time, and I like that.

Lorraine Ball [00:25:49]:

Absolutely. I I love that this still works for them. And it’s funny because they they were not the 1st client that we did this strategy with, and they weren’t the last. But They were the ones that when I look at how this strategy introduced them to an entirely new generation of customers Mhmm. Customers. Mhmm. In an entirely different market. It’s it’s definitely one of my favorite applications of a good list building lead gen strategy.

Jennie Wright [00:26:20]:

Okay. Yeah. I love that. Lauren, thank you for sharing all of this. I was really excited for this episode because I really love diving into the specifics on different businesses and how these things work, and case studies are just a happy place. So I really appreciate you talking about this. Where can people connect with you or find you, listen to your podcast, all those good details?

Lorraine Ball [00:26:44]:

So, More Than A Few Words is a marketing conversation for business owners, and it’s available wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find it on more than a few words.com. Jenny’s interview will be coming up soon.

Jennie Wright [00:26:57]:

Yay.

Lorraine Ball [00:26:59]:

And if you really wanna see more of what I’m doing, you can definitely look for me on LinkedIn. That’s That is where I hang out most often.

Jennie Wright [00:27:07]:

Excellent. Well, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of great links that you gave us in, when we were starting to onboard you for this process. We’ll put all of those in the show notes so you can look right underneath this episode wherever you’re listening. It’ll be in the notes right below, so you’ll get all that good Detail, and you can check out, Lorraine and everything that she does. And thank you so much, Lorraine, for making the time to be here. I know you’re a busy woman, and I really appreciate it. And just Just glad that we could have the conversation.

Lorraine Ball [00:27:34]:

Thank you. It’s always fun chatting.

Jennie Wright [00:27:36]:

Absolutely. And if you’re listening to the podcast, wherever you’re listening, Please make sure to stay in touch with us. Hit that subscribe button. Give us a comment or a review so I know how you feel about what I’m doing. My whole job here is to try and enlighten you and share all the details about how list building and lead generation can be so great for your business and all the strategies that go along with it. So thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you all soon.