I wanted to share with you, this Virtual Assistant case study from a client who was interested in starting a blog and email marketing.

I thought it would be useful to start a series to show the different projects that I work on as a Virtual Assistant. Whether that’s because you’re interested in becoming a Virtual Assistant yourself, or you’re looking to hire me on a project or long-term basis.

Some client names will be changed to protect the identity of the client.

Virtual Assistant Case Study

Gem messaged me and said that she wanted to start a blog on her Teepee website and set up email marketing but she didn’t know where to start.

She was starting another project and didn’t have the time to look into SEO and how to set up email marketing for her Teepee business.

After a quick call we came up with a plan, contracts* were signed and I got to work on what was agreed.

*Contracts are non-negotiable, whether you’re a Virtual Assistant or a client. Always make sure there’s a contract to protect both of you.

Email Marketing

I first got started with finding an email marketing provider that would be the most suitable for her requirements. Gem had a list of subscribers that she had collected when attending events so she had a good start for an email list. I decided to set her up with Mailerlite as there’s a lot of functionality on the free plan and that’s up to 1000 subscribers.

I researched thoroughly into Gem’s business to make sure that any of the text I included about her business was written in her brand voice and consistent with her social media content. She had also send me her brand colours and preferred fonts so I had a clear idea of what she wanted.

I created a landing page on Mailerlite and an automated Welcome email for when people subscribe to the list. I also created a few graphics in case she wanted to promote the landing page on social media.

I also made an RSS feed automation to send an email to subscribers with the latest blog post.

Finally I added the collected emails to Mailerlite to trigger the Welcome emails to be sent. Gem wanted her list to be separated into groups as her customers were interested in either Teepee parties or Wedding corners.

Starting A Blog

Gem allowed me access to her Wix website so I started to familiarise myself with this particularly web builder and then set up a blog page for her website.

Next I did a deep dive into the event organisers industry to see what would be a good first blog post for her blog. I decided that a blog post talking about reasons to throw a teepee party would be a great first post for her blog. You can read the post below.

All of this took me 5 hours to complete. It was a pleasure to work with Gem on this project and help her to get setup for email marketing and blogging.

Lastly, I gave Gem some tips for writing any future blog posts for her website, eg ways that she can use different tools to do some keyword research and get ideas for blog posts.

There’s a lot to learn with blogging, that’s why I’ve written a few guides to help you bloggers out. Free blogging tools and how to write an engaging blog post.

Virtual Assistant Case Study

The next client who I want to include a case study of is Thomas. Thomas is a Neurodivergent Theatre Owner, Producer, Writer and Actor. Thomas has an extremely successful business, the main thing he was struggling with was managing his calendar and occasionally keeping on top of the incoming emails.

As I had some personal experience with neurodivergent people, I reached out to Wired Differently and they set me up with this client.

Thomas had previously had help from family members and prior to the covid pandemic also had a Personal Assistant to help him with personal tasks, Inbox and Calendar management.

Neurodiversity

In case you don’t know much about the differences between neurotypical and neurodivergent. I’ll give you a brief description below.

Neurodivergent: refers to someone who is differing in mental or neurological function from what is considered typical or normal

Neurotypical: is a term used to describe individuals with typical neurological development

People who are diagnosed with the following are considered neurodivergent:

• ADHD
• Autism
• OCD
• Dyspraxia
• Dyslexia
• Dyscalculia
• Tourette’s

Neurodiversity is a way of celebrating that although some people, think and process things differently.. it doesn’t mean they’re wrong or a problem in society.

Thomas specifically has ADHD.

Some of the main symptoms of ADHD are slow to complete tasks, forgetfulness, hyper-focus on certain tasks, sleep problems, financial problems and low self-esteem. These are just some ideas, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who has ADHD will suffer from all of these symptoms.

Even without the fact that Thomas is neurodivergent, I honestly have no idea how he managed his calendar himself.. I get tired just looking at everything he has going on in the day! #introvertproblems

Inbox Management

A study was done recently by Zippia and it’s estimated that globally 347.3 billion emails are sent every day!

Isn’t that crazy!

They also state that in 2019 half of the world’s population (3.9billion) used emails for communication.

It’s no wonder that many people and businesses use emails for regular communications with their team, placing orders, arranging meetings and sometimes for email marketing purposes.

It’s no surprise that as a Virtual Assistant one of the main tasks that clients want you to do is to help with Inbox management!

When I started working with Thomas, I was given an assistant Google account to use which also had delegated access to his Inbox. This is actually quite an efficient way of dealing with Inbox management because it means that everything related to booking meetings and events can come through me separately and doesn’t clog up Thomas’ Inbox with multiple threads.

Once I got the hang of the types of emails that were coming through on a regular basis, I set to work to delete some of the 3000+ emails that were in the assistant Inbox. 😅

via GIPHY

The emails in the Inbox were all read and dealt with but they were going back to 3 years ago!

It’s worth noting that because I work on my laptop, it’s easier for me to see the amount of emails there. I know that most people open emails on a mobile device because it’s easier, in fact 61/9% of all emails opened are opened on mobile devices.

Due to this though, on a mobile you’re more likely to forget emails are there once you’ve read, replied and dealt with the email.

So my big task was to go through these emails and delete anything that was not needed. I kept anything relating to projects, properties and finances because that seemed sensible.

There was a label system already in place for storing emails so I just adjusted these a bit and added my own for what I thought would be the most helpful going forward.

I also had to work out a system that would work for Thomas with the emails in his Inbox. We experiemented with me starring/marking as ‘important’ on some emails in his Inbox but unfortunately he could not see these emails easily on a mobile device.

Instead we settled on me deleting any emails related to meetings once I’d dealt with them and if he’s busy with writing, I’ll snooze non-urgent emails until a time that he can deal with them. This just stops the Inbox building up too much while he’s unable to deal with the emails that only he can deal with.

Calendar Management

Thomas stated during our discovery call that the main task that he needed help with was calendar management.

I would agree with this because he is a very busy man and there are often a lot of people who want to book meetings with him.

Most of my tasks related to calendar management are basically booking zoom meetings, making appointments, booking in person meetings/lunches and blocking out ‘do-not-disturb’ time for writing.

Under the assistant Google account I have Thomas’ calendar linked to mine and I just have to make sure that I add him as a guest and accept invitations on his behalf so that they appear in his calendar.

Sometimes back-to-back meetings are unavoidable but I try to avoid this in case meetings run over their scheduled time.

I will mention that it’s important to consider that every client is different and some processes aren’t going to work for every client. I personally love time blocking in my personal calendar but I know that just wouldn’t work for Thomas.

I’m a creature of habit and I like to structure my day so putting everything including school runs and lunchtime, helps me. From my experience with neurodivergent people, specifically ADHD – that kind of scheduling would just be overwhelming and probably wouldn’t work.

It’s quite common for Virtual Assistants to do a wide range of other tasks for clients and with Thomas it’s no different.

Another project I’ve been helping with is creating invoices for expenses related to specific writing jobs.

Thomas is also renovating a property he bought so I’ve also been obtaining quotes for various parts of this renovation. I created a spreadsheet to put these quotes and a separate sheet with what has been done to the property so far and all of the costs related.

Final Thoughts

That’s it for now, I hope reading these Virtual Assistant case studies has inspired you with how you can improve your business, whether you’re a newbie Virtual Assistant or you’re looking to hire one.

With clients, everyone has different things that they are looking for a Virtual Assistant to help with and that’s why I thought it would be useful to do a Virtual Assistant case study for each of my clients. That way you can see the variety of different tasks that Virtual Assistants do and how it helps.

If you are interested in learning more, you can book a FREE call with me here. There’s no obligation but you might just find that outsourcing is exactly what you need to free up more time and progress your business in a stress-free way.

If you’re not quite ready to book the call, you can find out more about what to expect when working with me.

Damaris

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