Q&A with Jhenielle
-
Transcript
Unknown speaker 00:04
Welcome to Dula Tips and Tits, the podcast where we cut through the noise and get real about what it takes to build a sustainable doula business. I'm Kaylee Harrod. I've been a doula informally for 14 years and full time for seven.
Unknown speaker 00:20
Around here, we don't sugarcoat stuff. We talk autonomy, owning your worth, creating a business that works for you. No fluff, no burnout, just the honest truth on how to be your own best boss. Let's get into today's episode.
Unknown speaker 00:36
Welcome back. We have a Q&A episode today and the question is from Janiel Reynolds. I think I am saying your name correctly, Janiel. I hope so. Please correct me if I'm wrong and Janiel is asking about balancing the flow of information that you send to clients in a way that balances not getting too much overwhelm, but also not sending too little information.
Unknown speaker 01:05
This is a tricky one and her kind of question goes into some of this. I'm going to summarize it a bit. It's tricky because some people hire you like the second they find out they're pregnant. Other people hire you later on in pregnancy.
Unknown speaker 01:19
And so if you have something like email automations or something like that, it's really hard to know how to just like plug people into that. Like do we know how do we do the cadence of email communication, right?
Unknown speaker 01:34
There's honestly a couple different ways to do this and I have done them. I've done this all of these ways. So there's not a right answer to this. So I'm just giving you kind of my perspective. At first, I scheduled out emails like literally every time someone hired me.
Unknown speaker 01:52
I had a schedule for roughly when I wanted to. I had like a spreadsheet when I wanted to send people information, what information I wanted to send. And then I would go into Google, my Gmail and schedule emails.
Unknown speaker 02:05
If you don't already know this, you can schedule emails in Google. The way you do that is when you have Google pulled up, instead of sending, instead of like pushing the send button, there's an option to schedule instead.
Unknown speaker 02:23
And so that's something that I used to do. So literally my email, like my work email was full of scheduled emails, but then I had to manually do that with every single client, right? And part of Janelle's question was like, okay, what does it look like to catch people up as well if, you know, someone has joined, you know, hired you when they're like 32 weeks pregnant versus someone who hired you at 12 weeks pregnant.
Unknown speaker 02:54
What does that look like in terms of information flow? So that's one way. So you can literally just schedule out emails and have kind of like an interval at which you do that. Now there, it is some, I mean, you can have things that are like, this really isn't pertinent to you unless you're in the second trimester.
Unknown speaker 03:12
And so therefore, if someone hires me in third trimester, I'm not sending that thing, right? So there's that way of kind of dealing with people hiring you at different times. That is the most labor intensive way to do it.
Unknown speaker 03:26
So I do not necessarily recommend doing it like that, but that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is have automations. But if you're gonna do it with automations, you kind of need to have it be very generic where things are going maybe like every week or something like that.
Unknown speaker 03:44
The problem with automations is that if you want things to be spaced, they have to be spaced based on when that person joined that automation. So let's say someone's due in December and they hire you now.
Unknown speaker 03:59
So they hire you, I'm recording this in June. So they hire you in June, and you have between June and December to send them information. But you only maybe have 10 emails for them, right? And so then when they join that automation, usually it's either when you physically put them in there or when they sign the contract, if you have it set up for the contract to start that automation.
Unknown speaker 04:21
So they join, a week later they get an email, a week later they get an email, a week later they get an email, right? Like blah, blah, blah, blah for the next 90 days or a hundred days, I guess, or however long your email automation goes.
Unknown speaker 04:35
And then you're not sending them automated emails after that, that's fine. But again, if you have 10 emails, you're sending them once a week, you need to have a minimum of 10 weeks with someone. So if people regularly hire you after 30 weeks, then it's a little bit trickier.
Unknown speaker 04:52
However, that does normally account for almost everybody, right? So I will say, one thing that I, the feedback I have gotten about that kind of system, because I did have that sort of system at one point, is that you have to remember to take someone out of that automation.
Unknown speaker 05:11
And if the automation goes on to be like, oh my gosh, you had your baby, congratulations, but they had a really rough birth, or, you know, something is happening that's like not ideal, they're having an emergency of some kind, their baby was born super early.
Unknown speaker 05:26
You need to, you have to remember to take them out of that so that they're not getting emails from you that sound incredibly tone deaf and gas lighty, right? Like that's really unhelpful. And this is also really like just sensitive time.
Unknown speaker 05:45
So it needs to be very, very cautiously handled. So that's kind of option number two, right? And I guess an option number two B. is have an automation that is set up in such a way that people join based on their trimester.
Unknown speaker 06:04
So I had this set up at one point. I get kind of like nerdy about the tech stuff. So if this starts to lose you, hold on, I'm not going to talk about it the whole time. But for me, I had an automation set up where it basically had different conditions.
Unknown speaker 06:21
So like someone hires me on the contract, I had them share their due date, but then I also had them share the trimester that they're currently in. That trimester, and I gave them options for a second, third, so they didn't write something funky because it needs to be precise.
Unknown speaker 06:39
If it's going to trigger an automation, it has to be the right phrase, right? So if someone clicked second trimester, they would get added to the second trimester automation. So then that automation had things that were pertinent to second trimester and also was long enough to last through second and third trimester, right?
Unknown speaker 06:59
Again, you have the issue of taking someone out of it if they no longer work with you, or their baby comes early, or they have a loss or something like that, right? So you need to be really vigilant about that, but that is a way to customize it.
Unknown speaker 07:13
If you have the tech knowledge to do that and the programs to do it with, right? Because not all CRMs, customer management systems, not all automations have that kind of intricacy in them. So it's not always possible to do that, but that's another way to deal with catching someone up, so to speak.
Unknown speaker 07:39
You're then just automatically putting third trimester people into the third trimester with the information that's most pertinent to them, rather than being like, shoot, the people who hired me at 12 weeks got four extra emails.
Unknown speaker 07:51
Well, of course they did. That's to be expected, right? Because they've had you through the early. part of pregnancy. So that's kind of another variation of option two. Option three is to have a resource that clients self-use.
Unknown speaker 08:11
That was a very confusing way to say that. A resource available to clients that they choose to tap into or not. Now this is how I do it now. I do it where I have resources about all kinds of things that I want them to know in my client portal.
Unknown speaker 08:27
My client portal is a password protected page that lives on my website. That client portal has all kinds of things. So it has like shopping lists, packing lists, checklists, books and podcasts and resources and information on different things.
Unknown speaker 08:45
Classes I love, providers I like, like so many different resources. Some people, oh there's there's a birth affirmations, you can print them, you can color them, like It's full of stuff. Some people, personality-wise, get in there and look at everything and they're like, your client portal is awesome.
Unknown speaker 09:05
You know, other people never sign into it and that's okay. That means really the person who never signed into it, honestly, wouldn't have used those resources when I sent them anyway because they didn't want those resources, right?
Unknown speaker 09:19
And so what I find helpful about that is if someone texts me and says, hey, you know, I'm having some like low back pain, I can still say, oh, hey, I really recommend this and this and this. And you know, here are those resources.
Unknown speaker 09:34
I'm not going to say you should have looked in the client portal, right? Like I'm not a jerk about it. But I do think to myself, I do have that information in the client portal, right? Because some other people, some other personalities are going to just find that information on their own.
Unknown speaker 09:50
And then I find that I still can kind of, and there's, I mean, there's information, of course, that comes up in my childbirth class that my clients take my prenatal sessions with them. So it's not that there's, I mean, there is information that everyone gets from me, right?
Unknown speaker 10:09
But those are like two individual emails that have to be sent prenatal visit, number one, prenatal visit, number two, rather than sending out all sorts of emails between those two times. And I'm really clear, honestly, my welcome email sets the tone for what to expect.
Unknown speaker 10:28
So it used to say, you can expect to hear from me, you're going to get like my informational emails every few weeks. Like that's what the welcome email said because, and the welcome email is something that is like, I hand email it because there's sometimes the need to change the information a bit.
Unknown speaker 10:47
There have been times in the past when I have automated it, but for right now, I don't have enough clients for them. that to be necessary for me. So I don't do that, but it includes things like, if you're having an emergency, make sure you call and don't text.
Unknown speaker 11:04
It includes like, what are your next steps? My next steps for you are, please fill out the intake form and then schedule your prenatal visit number one, schedule your prenatal visit number two. If they've purchased the class online, I say, here's the class login information.
Unknown speaker 11:19
You can get it here, use this code to get it at zero dollars so that you're not, because you already paid for it in the package, right? And it's setting the tone for like, hey, this is what to expect from me.
Unknown speaker 11:30
So my email, my welcome email now says, this is what I want you to do next. I want you to fill out the intake form, schedule our prenatal visits, and then start digging into the class or start digging into the client portal, right?
Unknown speaker 11:46
Client portal is here, here's the password for it. If you're winning books and podcasts and things like that, that is full of all that kind of stuff. It also has birth plan templates and things like that, but we will work on that together when we meet.
Unknown speaker 11:59
So don't feel the need to have any of that prepared ahead of time. So then they're very clear, and not only what to expect from me between here and when we have our first meeting, but also what the resources available to them are.
Unknown speaker 12:14
For me, that works best right now, but there's not a right way, right? There's lots of different ways to do it, and all the doulas do it differently, right? So I hope that's helpful. This was kind of a long Q&A, ended up being a whole episode worth of information.
Unknown speaker 12:31
But Janelle, thank you so much for sending that in, and then please do follow up with me. I'd love to hear kind of what your follow-up questions are. All right, if you wanna ask a question and you haven't done so, there is a link in the show notes to do that.
Unknown speaker 12:44
About once a month, I do a Q&A episode at this point, but as I get more questions, I will do them more frequently, all right? I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Dula Tips and Tits podcast.
Unknown speaker 13:01
If you learned something today or had an aha moment, we'd love for you to share that on Instagram and tag us at hiradula so we can celebrate alongside you. If you found this podcast helpful, we would so appreciate you taking a second to leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app.
Unknown speaker 13:19
That helps other doulas find us as we do this work together. This podcast is intended as educational and entertainment. It is not medical advice or business advice. Please consult your own medical or legal team for your own needs around your health and your business.
Unknown speaker 13:34
We'll see you again soon.
Thanks to Jhenielle for this question!
Jhenielle asked: [summarized] How do you balance the flow of information that you send to clients in a way that they're not getting too much information and overwhelm, but also not sending too little information. When some people hire you immediately after finding out they’re pregnant and others in the 3rd trimester who do you balance what to send to both of those people and automate some of that?
ASK A QUESTION!!! My plan is to start Friday Q&A (we need a new name, I know!) but first I need your questions! Submit them using the form below:
https://www.harroddoulaservices.com/ask-me-a-question
CONNECT with Kaely on TikTok or Instagram
https://www.tiktok.com/@doulacoach
https://www.instagram.com/Harroddoula/
If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me @harroddoula
Doula Tips and Tits is produced by Kaely Harrod of Harrod Doula Services
It is sponsored by The Doula Biz Blueprint Self-Paced Class for Doulas Launching Successful and Sustainable Businesses!
Music by Madirfan: Hidden Place on Pixabay
