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Introduction
In this lesson we’re going to answer two questions: Why & How? Although we touched on the issue of why and how in the last lesson, those were generalities. In this lesson, we’re going to examine – hands-on – the why and how of email marketing for your business.
Why would you use it?
Every business decision should start with this question. Put another way, you might ask the age old WIIFM (“What’s in it for me?).
If, after analyzing its potential value, you discover none for your business, you should scrap the idea. Don’t waste your money or time on it… especially on a plan like this that generally requires a long-term commitment on your part.
Weigh the pros and cons to your business and ask a few trusted friends what they think of the idea first.
Not everyone will find it useful. Some will and some won’t. If you don’t think you’ll find it useful, then there’s no point in using it. However, many businesses – both for-profit and non-profit are finding ways to use email marketing. As well, the internet is constantly changing so you might not find a use for email marketing in your business today… but you may just a few months down the road!
Why use email marketing? The first reason is fairly simple: unlike direct mail, which costs per person, email marketing has lower per-person costs because the cost to send an email to 10,000 people is roughly the same as it is to send it to just 10 people. But more than the cost, there’s another reason: Asking for permission (by getting someone’s email address) is a way of discovering and marketing to warm leads.
Business is all about leads.
Cold leads are the ones who have absolutely no interest in buying from you. Perhaps they typed the wrong word into the search line and ended up at your store. Maybe they thought they clicked on one link and ended up clicking on your URL instead. They are the mall-walkers to stroll past your store and – when asked by your staff if they can be helped – they say, “no thanks, just looking.” Cold leads have no interest in buying from you and require a lot of work to convince that they should buy from you.
Warm leads, on the other hand, are people who may have some interest in buying from you… or, at the very least, they want to know more. They are the people who show up on the car lot and ask the car salesperson questions about a specific model of a car. Warm leads may not be ready to buy yet, but they’re more likely willing to listen to your sales message… and they’re more likely going to buy when they have a need and the price is right. They require a lot less work to get a warm lead to buy from you than a cold lead.
How do you get warm leads?
There are several ways. One way is through appropriately placed text ads, like Google AdWords. Another way to get warm leads is by asking your happy customers for referrals. But one way to get a lot of your warm leads is from permission-based email marketing.
So email marketing, then, is a way to find warm leads and continue to market to them over and over.
While many business do try to survive on cold leads (and if you’re on the internet and not using email marketing or Google AdWords, for example, you’re trying to survive on cold leads, too) many businesses can do so much better with so much less effort by marketing to warm leads.
By putting an email capture line on your website, you’re basically asking people to self-identify as warm leads. And, depending on what you offer in exchange for that email, you can control the amount of warm leads you get.
How would you use it?
There are all kinds of ways to use email marketing. We’ll try to cover the gamut of the most popular ways, but there are more ways and technology is always changing and you may yet find new ways that are more appropriate to your business.
Here are two of the most popular ways to use permission-based email marketing:
• Email-based newsletters are one of the most popular forms of email marketing out there. It’s a great way to get your prospects to sign up (and you can automatically enroll your customers at the same time). Newsletters are popular only if they are useful. By useful, we mean that they have to be informative, helpful, and not packed with sales messages. People don’t mind receiving an email-based newsletter from someone that does have sales messages in it, but there should be some good, useable content. One example might be a newsletter from a vacuum cleaner sales company… they may put small ads in their newsletter about their vacuum cleaners, but they might also put in really useful tips about house cleaning or running a cleaning business. The key is USEFUL. Email newsletters should be interesting and regular.
• Another popular email marketing is more popularly used for customers (as opposed to prospects) although there’s no reason why you can’t use it for both. This email marketing method is to send out periodic messages about upcoming sales or end-of-the-season blow-outs. The idea here is that it is clearly a highly sales-oriented email. If people sign up for it, they are likely more willing to receive sales messages.
Which one is better?
Here are the pros and cons:
Newsletter
Pros
• Regular… customers come to expect it.
• Helpful… readers will save it and turn to it again and again.
• Subtle… readers will read sales messages without realizing it.
• Reach your target audience BECAUSE THEY ASKED FOR IT.
Cons
• More work… there’s an element of design and the regularity needs to be maintained.
• Your sales messages may be too subtle to be effective.
Sale update
Pros
• Clear, distinct sales message.
• Not a lot of work.
• Biggest sales get you noticed by more people.
Cons
• No reason to save email.
• Could be confused with spam.
Summary
Email marketing is a great permission-based method of marketing. It’s basically the process of asking prospects to identify themselves as warm leads and when they’ve done that, you can continue to tell them about your products or services. Two of the most popular email marketing strategies are the regular newsletter or the periodic sales update… these strategies are both used effectively by businesses and non-profits to market to their warm leads.
Watch your email for lesson 3 in a couple of days…
You are Awesome!
–Dave
Blogging is taking off like a wildfire. People are blogging about just about anything you can think of. From the daily routine of their cat, to technology reviews, to politics.
Until the blogosphere sorts itself out and matures a bit more, it may be difficult to tell exactly how this new frontier of instant publishing can help you and your business grow. But don’t worry – you’ll start getting a flood of new ideas in the coming months.
For now, the most important thing you can do is develop the right mindset about business blogging. What you think about something, and how you strategize appyling it in your business very often has more to do with succes than the technology, tool, or resource itself.
With that in mind, here is the most important thing you can do. Keep your eye on people.
DO NOT get stuck on the “technology.” That’s what drove all the pie-in-the-sky dot.com dreamers into the financial abyss. It’s people and personal communication that matter most, and should always be a the center of all your thoughts, strategies, and actions.
Blogging is just a tool. But it’s a tool that can and should become a major support arm of your business. Why?
Because it exponentially multiplies the world’s oldest, most favored, and trusted form of information sharing — word of mouth.
Just ask yourself, whom do you trust the most to give you advice, recommendations, and information about opportunities, purchases, or choices? Someone you know and trust, right? Someone who you feel is just like you.
That type of trust comes from personal communication, social interaction, and the joining together of like-minded individuals. Blogging simply magnifies and expands that sense of community and more personalized communication, and then expands the reach across the entire world!
Link trust; with respect, positioning, and word-of-mouth and you have the makings of a powerful marketing arm that can initiate an ever-growing stream of highly targeted prospects.
Remember, it’s the relationships that matter most. Keep your eye on that fact, and you’ll always have the right mindset for business blogging that’s a benefit for you and your readers.
Keep Moving Forward!
–Dave
Introduction
In this lesson you’ll learn about the basics of email marketing: what it is and who does it. This lesson will build a good foundation so that you can enjoy maximum success when you develop your own email marketing system.
What is e-mail marketing?
As its name suggests, email marketing is the method businesses use of marketing to their prospects and customers through email. (For the purposes of this e-course, we call “prospects” the people who have never bought from you and “customers” the people who have bought from you… although sometimes it gets redundant to say that. In general, we may refer to one or the other but mean both and if we want to highlight one of those groups, we’ll let you know. Some businesses only market to prospects, others only market to customers, and some market to both).
And, for the purposes of this e-course, we are referring to your email messages as sales messages and to your audience as prospects and customers… but that doesn’t mean that only for-profit organizations can use it! On the contrary, many non-profit organizations use these same ideas too. The only difference is in semantics… otherwise, everything else (including how you write the message) is exactly the same.
What types of email marketing are there?
Generally speaking, there are two types of email marketing.
• Unsolicited.
• Permission-based.
Let’s look at each of these right now.
Unsolicited email marketing
Unsolicited email marketing is generally referred to as “spam.” Spam is a huge and growing concern on the Internet because of the amount of time it wastes: it fills drive space, it’s a vehicle for scams and viruses, and it reduces productivity. More importantly (from a business stand-point) it increases the amount of “clutter” in someone’s inbox and thereby reduces a prospect’s or customer’s appreciation of your sales message… even if it’s important.
We do not endorse spam-style email marketing.
Spam marketing is largely ineffective and is one of the things that have become a hassle on the Internet. We want to promote an enjoyable, healthy, safe, and trouble-free Internet experience and that starts with each marketer choosing against sending unsolicited email marketing.
Clarification: There are different kinds of spam out there.
1. There are the ubiquitous “Nigerian scams” that fill our inboxes with all-caps messages from some low-level banker or public servant.
2. There are less-than-family-friendly messages about anatomy enlargement or some other sensitive topic that you don’t want your young children reading. These often have subject lines designed to get past your spam filters that read “v1agra” or “enlargem3nt.”
3. There are legitimate businesses that try to sell legitimate products or services but send messages to purchased lists that include everyone and anyone.
The first type of emails is illegal and part of something called a “419 scam.” Don’t send them. Don’t answer them. Just delete them or report them to the authorities.
The second type of emails is debatable. Their methods of trying to counteract your spam filter and their subject matter make their legitimacy debatable. (Which is why we separated them out from the third type of emails). Moreover, they are often inappropriate for a family inbox.
The third type of emails is the “least worst” of the batch. However, if you are an email marketer, you will still want to avoid sending unsolicited email.
How do people get your email to send these? Often, your email may appear in a list if, for example, you signed up for something on the Internet. To counter this, more and more companies are posting privacy statements promising to NOT sell your email address to anyone. However, just because that posting exists, doesn’t mean that you should feel completely free to give your email address out… recently, one company was fined for posting that privacy statement then turning around and selling a list of emails three times over! Of course, not everyone who asks for your email address is bad; we’re just mentioning this to you for two reasons:
1. First, so you will be cautious and judicious in where you leave your email.
2. Second, so you will know what other consumers are thinking about before they leave their email with you: you’d better do a good job of appearing legitimate!
Other ways that people get your email address is by using computer programs that scour the Internet for email addresses. That’s why many people now post their email addresses like this:
myname(at)mydomain(dot)com rather than myname@mydomain.com.
Another way people can get your email address is by those increasingly annoying forwards that seem to circle the globe three or four times. Perhaps you’ve received one from a friend or family member. The subject line usually looks like this:
Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd: You HAVE to see this!
It’s usually a humorous or heart-warming message promising luck or good fortune to someone who passes it on. When you open it up there are usually huge lists of email addresses in there of people in the past who have received it and sent it to someone else. This is a veritable goldmine of email addresses to scammers looking to send unsolicited sales messages to people.
That’s unsolicited email marketing. Not recommended. For the purposes of this book, please realize that the type of Internet marketing we are referring to is the second kind… permission-based marketing.
Permission marketing
Permission marketing is very simple and straightforward: rather than merely blasting your sales message to whatever email address you have, you gather email addresses and send your message to those people.
To collect those email addresses, the most common (and legitimate) things to do are…
• Invite visitors to leave their email address at your site.
• Ask people for the email address during the sale.
The first kind of invitation is very common and you’ve probably seen many websites that do this: they have a line where you can “sign up now for a free newsletter” and a place to input their email address along with a button to submit. That is permission-based marketing because the act of them putting their email address into the line gives you permission to contact them.
Asking visitors for their email address during the sale serves a very similar purpose. As people transact with you, they may be quite willing to leave their email address with you for future updates. It’s another way of asking for permission.
Summary
Many businesses and non-profits use email marketing to advertise their business. Ethical, legitimate companies use permission-based email marketing to get the job done effectively. Now that you know some of the details about permission-based marketing, let’s look at how you can use it effectively to build your business!
Watch your email for lesson 2 in a couple of days…
You are Awesome!
–Dave
Last year was a tough year for the flowers in my patio area. My rose bush (which I thought had died) did not start growing until August. This year the Rose bush came up right away in the Spring. Here is a short video showing you this crazy plant.
This thing is absolutely CRAZY!
One year nothing and the next year 6 foot stalks. I would love for you to post some comments below.
Keep Moving Forward!
–Dave
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