Building your readership

Like collecting baseball cards, email marketing gurus collect email addresses and bragging between peers tends towards a comparison of number: 10,000 email address… 11,000… 12,000… each person trying to outdo the other with a greater figure of warm leads.

So how do you get the very first one? Where do you start?

Getting started

The first place you should look is to your current list of customers. It costs less to keep a customer than it does to win a new one and yet e-business owners seem to forget that they have a database of happy customers and spend extraordinary amounts of money on advertising to win new ones.

Gather all of your customer’s emails into one folder and start with them. Send out a special message – perhaps a sale of some kind.

If the product you sell is a one-time purchase and doesn’t lend itself well to repeat purchases from the same customer, send out a referral coupon: if they refer someone to you and that person buys, they will get some kind of discount or money back. Or use the “makes a great gift” idea and talk about how your product could be purchased for someone else.

Either way, you’re doing a few things by sending out this message:

• You’re going to start the process of sending out messages… which is something you’ll have to decide to do if you want to proceed.
• You’re unconsciously announcing to your happy clients that you want to do more business with them.
• You’re testing the waters to get an idea about what a repeat purchase promotion could do for your business.
• You’re testing their email addresses, since people change addresses… they may have changed since they bought from you. (Delete the address if it bounces back to you… but don’t delete your customer. See if there is a land address for them and add them to a direct marketing mailout.
• You’re testing to see the response from your customers on receiving something from you. Some niches are more responsive than others at receiving email marketing. People who spend a lot of time in their email may not mind a short message from you periodically but they won’t want to spend too much time reading and deleting messages that don’t apply.

Once you have sent out a test email, it’s time to start collecting email addresses and putting them into a file.

How do you do that?

Collecting email addresses

One of the easiest ways is simply to put an email capture line on your website.

If you create your own websites, you can easily put an email capture line in… even if you create your website in Microsoft Word. Right click on the menu bar and select from the list “web tools” and a menu of website features will come up that you can insert into your webpage.

Alternatively, if you use templates to do that, you may be able to add it in with your design and hosting service provider. www.godaddy.com, for example, gives you the ability to do that by simply clicking a couple buttons.

You may also consider getting email addresses through a promotion. For example, offer a referral bonus to people who recommend some friends to you who buy.

Each newsletter should also include a link that says “email this to a friend.” Although you won’t collect their email address by doing that, you may find that people who receive the email from a friend might be more inclined to contact you or even subscribe.

Another way to collect email addresses is to build and advertise a site that focuses entirely on collecting email addresses.

Suppose you own a consulting business. Your website advertises your services and has plenty of information about your business. You want to build up your business with email marketing but you can’t seem to get people to come to your site.

One way to do that would be to build another site – and “landing page” – where people arrive and are exposed to JUST a one-page advertisement that focuses on the benefits of your service. Then, at the bottom of the page is an email capture line. The caption might read “subscribe to an newsletter for more information on improving sales” (if that’s what your consultancy is about).

That way, rather than arriving on your company’s site and being overwhelmed with content that may not have anything to do with what they are looking for, the landing page clearly and easily describes what they can get and gives them an easy to get it.

How do you get people to that landing page? Advertising it is much easier than advertising your site. And when people arrive at it, they are presented with a single, clear message rather than to the many mixed messages your site might give them. (You may sell only one thing, but your FAQs, your different delivery methods, your product descriptions and sample downloads all are messages that can confuse a prospect).

This method of sales is very popular and works well for the sale of ebooks through providers like clickbank.com and it can work for your business, too.

Summary

You probably have already mastered your sales cycle, along with your niche and marketing ideas. Now, as you branch into email marketing, it’s time to master another aspect of e-business. Rather than selling your services, sell your prospects on the idea of subscribing to a free newsletter that they’re interested in. It’s a great way to get in their faces on a regular basis to tell them about your products or services. And it all starts by capturing their interest and their email address.

You are Awesome!
~~Dave

What you need (and need to know) in order to get started

Getting started in email marketing is fairly easy. You can probably do it with the systems you have right now.

Then, once you build up your database of recipients and you become busier, you may want to move the process over to a more complex system to help you.

But let’s start at the simplest system first and then we’ll look at an advanced system to help you build your email marketing empire every step of the way.

Basic

You can actually start with the systems you already have in place right now. You can very easily place an email capture line on your website… if you use a system like www.godaddy.com, you can add one simply by clicking a button or two.

Or, if you are an offline business – like a restaurant or a car dealership – and you want to build your email marketing campaign, you can simply ask customers to leave their email address with you.

As you collect these emails, you can put them into a group. In fact, your email system probably has the capability to do that already. (For example, with Yahoo.com, you can add all of your email addresses to a list then select which ones you want to appear in their own group, then you can label that group). Every time you get an email address, add it to that group. Then, when it comes time to send out your message (whether it’s a regular message like a newsletter or a periodic message like the sales update) you insert the group name into your BCC: line.

A BCC line means “Blind Carbon Copy” and it means that all of the people who receive the message do not have the email addresses of the others… thus you keep your prospect list private.

If you want to send out a regular message, like a newsletter or e-zine, you can pre-write the document and even pre-write the email. Put your prospect message group in the BCC: line then schedule the mail-out for the date that you want it. If you don’t expect a lot of changes to your message group, then you can schedule it fairly far out (a few months even). However, if someone requests to be taken off your list, it could be a lot of work so you may not want to schedule too far out.

In this way, you’ve been able to create a fairly easy system right from your desktop or online email system.

Advanced

It’s true that the basic system doesn’t cost money. For some businesses that might be an appropriate place to start if you are building your email marketing campaign on a limited budget in your early days.

However, as you enjoy an increase in success, you should really consider implementing an increase in your email marketing campaign. After all, the system described above may work for a few dozen or a few hundred names, but some businesses have thousands upon thousands of subscribers to their newsletter and it’s going to get more and more difficult to manage as time goes on.

Enter an email marketing system.

Good email marketing systems are usually designed to help you do three things:

1. design your message
2. manage your contacts
3. track your reports

When you’re looking for an email marketing system, make sure it does all three.

Design your message. Good email marketing systems will give you templates for either (or both) html or text-based messages. That way, you can start with something that’s already well-designed, input your own content, and tweak it slightly to match the look and feel you want.

Manage your contacts. By managing your contacts, your email marketing system takes a lot of the work off of your hands. You’re able to import lists, for example (if you get a big influx of names or you buy a list of email addresses, you’re able to import them easily). You should also be able to manage emails that bounce back to you. As well, good email marketing systems should be able to perform automatic unsubscribe functions so that someone can unsubscribe to an email if they want to. (Again, compare this to the basic system of using your own email address… people would send you an unsubscribe request and then you’d have to manually remove it from the list. You should also be able to add headers, footers, and signatures to your emails.

Track your reports. This is a powerful function of the email marketing system. It allows you to see your message views, whether or not they click on any of the links in the message, as well as the history of the subscriber.

You get what you pay for, they say. If you have a small list and can manage it on your own, you can use the free and basic email marketing system available with the creative use of your own email address.

For more money – from a few dollars to several hundred dollars a month, you can get a powerful email marketing system.

There are many good ones out there. Check out the free demos of my 2 favorites to see what I use.

Here are my personal favorites:

www.aweber.com
www.1ShoppingCart.com

If you want to see more, simply Google “email marketing” or “autoresponder” and visit some of the results.

Summary

Email marketing systems are good to have to help build your business. If you are just getting started, consider using an email marketing system that is free… and you probably already own it: your email address. It’s appropriate for smaller batches of emails when you’re first getting your name out there. But for a few dollars (to a few hundred dollars) a month, you can build a powerful email marketing campaign with a feature-rich email marketing system designed to help you (My favorite is Aweber). Check them out, find your top three favorites, and give them a try.

Keep Moving Forward!

–Dave

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