Your website

What does your website have to do with email marketing? On one hand, nothing at all: you’re sending out emails to people and they are meant to respond to those emails with action… website.

But on the other hand, your website has EVERYTHING to do with email marketing. For once your audience arrives there… what do they do?

If your website is not well-constructed to deliver your customers to the buy-now button, then it will not make as many sales as it could. You want to change that. Here’s how:

The first thing you have to do is change your thinking when it comes to a website:

It wasn’t that long ago that every business was putting up these new things called “web sites” on this new fangled “Internet.” Little regard was given to what constituted a good website or a bad one; at the time, a true mark of being a cutting edge company was having a URL on your business card. (And in those days, the URLs were all big, awkward, and unmemorable: http://www.thewidgetcompany.com/mainpage/index/02/316. It’s unwieldy!)

Since then, times have changed and now businesses can simply mark: thewidgetcompany.com on their marketing material.

During those early days, though, people didn’t know what to put on websites. They posted anything and everything they could get their hands on: from office bios to hours of operation to marketing materials to technical manuals. Some useful, some useless.

Over time, as the Internet became a bigger and bigger deal, people gained an understanding for what was meant to go on a website and what kind of purpose a website provides.

Your website is meant to act like a filter.

Think of a path. At the start of the page, you direct the prospects. At the end of the path is the purchase you intend them to make. Along the way, some people leave the path and go their own way, choosing not to make the purchase you want them to make (maybe it’s just not the right time for them). But others will leave the path accidentally, perhaps confused by a path that crosses it. Your goal is make that path you WANT them to take.

To do that, you have to clearly mark your path and you have to reduce the amount of different paths they can take.

One method of success is to select the step you most want them to take and put that front and center on your main page.

Compare these two typical menus found on the side of many businesses:

The first one is one of the most common lists of menus. Everything seems to be almost randomly placed and it’s difficult to tell what you want.

Compare that menu with this one. What do you notice?

It becomes very clear what action you want people to take. You can still leave some of the other items on your menu, but a slight re-organization and by highlighting the most important step in the process, you can help to guide the actions of your prospect.

Some businesses do this very well: They simply offer one action on the first page: a brief bit of text telling you about the business.

Then they offer a single “next” button at the bottom of the page. When a prospect clicks on it, there’s more information about them… and another “next” button. As the client pushes each “next” button, they are taken through the process until the next button to press doesn’t say “next” but rather “buy now.”

Reducing choice will increase your customers.

Why do people put lots of options on their site? Because some businesses feel that by simply blasting all of the information they need to give to a client all at once, they will earn business. Unfortunately, information overload drives people away.

There’s nothing wrong with having links on your site, but (like the example menu above) make sure you make it very clear what action you want your prospects to take next.

We’ve called your website a path… but it is also a funnel: it’s a sales funnel that pours prospects in the top (through your email marketing) and should turn them into customers coming out the bottom. However, if you make the process too confusing or obscure (or provide too many options) you’ll reduce the hole through which you want your customers to come.

Summary

Businesses who use email marketing have one more job: that is to make sure their website effectively sells. One of the ways to do that is to create a website that clearly states to your customer what it is you want them to do. In this way, you’ll start the process of creating an effective funnel that will drive more business to your door.

You are Awesome!
~~Dave

Creating an e-mail marketing document

We have looked at the content of the document in lesson 5 and the format the document in lesson 6. Now it’s time to turn our attention to the bigger picture.

Creating a series

A lot of care should be put into creating a series, even if you plan on sending out only occasional updates.

A series of email marketing messages should be intentional and well-defined; not haphazard.

As you decide on the content, you will have already started the consideration of how regular you want your marketing campaign to be. Obviously we’re not defining the occasional sales message here, but the more intentional and regular messages of newsletters and e-zines.

• Motley Fool, the investment advice organization, sends out newsletters fairly frequently… sometimes a few a day. If this is the route you want to take, be aware that it could take a lot of your time and effort which may potentially take away from other aspects of your business. However, you’ll be able to create shorter “bite sized” messages and you’ll always be at the top of your audience’s mind. Flylady.com is another organization that sends out several messages each day.

• Many email marketing campaigns send out messages once per week or once per month. Depending on your product and your audience, one might be more appropriate than another. If your audience is at the computer more often, they might want a single, shorter message each week. If they have less time but still crave helpful information, once a month might be more appropriate.

Would you ever do anything less frequently than once a month? That depends on who you are and what you do. Generally speaking, the larger the purchase you offer, the less frequently you have to send your message. For example, a car dealership should advertise more frequently than a realtor. An appliance dealer should advertise more frequently than a car dealership. A computer retailer should advertise more frequently than an appliance dealer. And so on.

Also, your message can determine what you send out. If you send out The Authoritative Buyer’s Guide to Stocks, you can probably get away with putting it out every quarter. More frequently would lower the worth of your message. Less frequently might make people forget who you are and confuse your occasional message with the spam in their inbox.

Ideally, you will probably want to create a mix of messages to send out. Here is an example for a car dealership:

• Weekly: highlight the 3 best deals on your lot plus money-saving car maintenance tips.
• Monthly: highlight the 3 most popular cars that month plus a coupon for an oil change and a free car detailing.
• Quarterly: Offer tips for traveling during that season along with a coupon for a seasonal check-up.

Here is an example from a financial company:

• Weekly: talk about some market movers and shakers and highlight one stock that seems to be doing well.
• Monthly: Highlight the top-moving stocks for that month.
• Quarterly: offer an authoritative buyer’s guide to stocks that could do well this quarter.

Here is an example from a company that provides online business consultation services:

• Weekly: highlight one customer with whom you’re doing business.
• Monthly: Analyze and industry that your clients use for vendors or customers.
• Quarterly: create a “state of the industry” document that talks about the industry in which your clients work.

As you can see, just from these examples, there are many exciting things you can do with your email marketing campaign and a campaign that mixes two or more frequencies can provide a variety of added-value services to clients.

Ultimately, you want to find content that they will find useful. That way, they’ll read the content and link its authoritative voice to you. And when they need the product or service that you offer, they will naturally turn to the authority on the matter… you. By providing a variety of messages at a variety of frequencies, you’ll be more likely able to stay at the top of their mind and enjoy “stickiness” which is a marketing term referring to how often someone views and returns to your message. Notice how the weekly, monthly, and quarterly messages in the above 3 examples are generally things that people might be interested in saving and going back to time and time again.

Creating coherence

You have decided on your frequency (and counted the cost, which you should have done in a previous lesson… just make sure the numbers are still the same if you’ve increased the frequency).

Now it’s time to assemble your message. In a previous lesson you started to put together a document that outlined the topics you wanted to cover in a year. If you want to publish weekly, make sure you have 52 ideas. If you want to publish monthly, make sure you have 12 ideas.

Some people feel that they should be fine starting with 30 or 35 ideas instead of 52, figuring that the other 17 to 22 ideas will come in time. Although you may want to do this, you are really taking a chance on it. The reason is that business often gets in the way of our best laid plans and before you know it, you’ve used up all of your planned ideas and now you’re faced with 4 or 5 months without any ideas to start you off. You will quickly fall behind. (We’re not trying to be negative here… just realistic from years of experience!)

Upon hearing our suggestion, some people may say that their industry is so news-sensitive that it doesn’t make sense to have the full list of ideas. This may be true, but Murphy’s Law suggests that those last 4 or 5 months will be “slow news months” and you’ll continue to struggle.

The best practice when developing a schedule is to come up with the full list of ideas. Then, if news does strike, you can always move one of the ideas to next year. However, if news doesn’t happen, you will have something to talk about.

In addition to creating a list, take note of the day it will fall on. Sometimes you may have to (or want to) adjust your message according to that day. If you are sending out messages on the 1st of every month, you can gear your message to New Years, and each new fiscal quarter. But don’t look JUST to the day… look around at days that are close by: In the US, Independence Day falls on July 4th and that may be on your audience’s mind during your July 1st newsletter… so mentioning it in your letter may make your newsletters seem timely. Also, be wary of who your audience is: if you are marketing to Canadians, for example, wishing them a happy Independence Day on July 4th isn’t appropriate. Instead, wish them happy Canada Day on July 1st.

Summary

In this lesson we talked about some of the frequency considerations you will need to think about when you’re developing your email marketing campaign. As well, you learned how you should build an entire year’s worth of campaign messages and appropriately organize them according to the seasons.

Watch for the next lesson…

You are Amazing!
-Dave

Before I get into any specifics, watch this short video that details some interesting facts about Social Media that you may not know:

Lets recap some of the facts in the video:

How many years do you think it will take for you to reach 50 million users?
Radio- 38 years
TV- 13 years
Internet- 4 years
iPod- 3 years

Fact: Facebook alone has added well over 100 million users in less than 9 months
Fact: 80% of companies are using LinkedIn to primarily find their employees
Fact: Mashable announced Twitter’s numbers will double by the end of 2009 to 12.1 million users, and gap up another 50 percent in 2010 to bring the service to a total audience of roughly 18 million registered users.

If these statistics don’t make you wake up and smell the Media Revolution then you are going to lose the Social Media battle.

How about this scenario: You have an upset customer (it could happen) and this person happens to have a Twitter following of 25,000 followers and 1500 Facebook friends. They talk about there bad experience and now 26,500 people instantly know about the experience that person had. I hope you realize that statistics show that if a person has a Fantastic experience they tell 5 people. If the same person has a bad experience they tell everyone they meet!

Social Media if used strategically by a Business can fix the issue before it gets out of hand. I actually had someone saying bad things about me when I had an exit pop installed on one of my sites and when I seen how many people didn’t like it, I apologized publicly and disabled the exit pop. After about two days everything was cool.

My point is to NOT take Social Media lightly, It is here to stay!

You are Amazing!

–Dave