An intro to email marketing
Hey guys, today we’re going talk about internet marketing. We could say email marketing recognized is a form of internet marketing. And while we might think of that today as a little bit old-fashioned, email marketing is still effective and viable. Definitely should be doing it but still, the most-visited place on the computer is the inbox visited. Not to discount sending, but using email to your advantage.
Now there are different ways to use that and let’s talk about maybe two or three of them. One would be obviously to sell. If we went back maybe ten years, back to the beginning of the email. Everybody was just dying to see what they got in their email. That we’re gonna read every single one obviously that’s no longer the case. There’s so much junk in the email we can’t go through them all. I personally have a pretty decent non-filtering system. But I do opt-out and things like that to limit a lot of junk. I still run into days where I have to go back and go through my emails. See what I missed or you see something really quick and you’re distracted and it sits there. A week later something says “Hey what happened to such and such?”
Effectiveness and attention
Basically, while it was effective and it’s still the most visited, the effectiveness and the attention on that inbox is less. Whatever you do with your email it has to be impactful. You have to grab the attention to make it easy. Think of it again like other mediums. You got a few seconds of attention to either have someone hit the delete button or pay attention and go a little bit further. So that’s a couple of ways to use email. One is I usually mail myself. Not as much as I should but two different ways to do that is one is for branding and I’m using it primarily more for branding just to stay in the customer’s mind. Not necessarily the email that goes out is a pitch to buy something or a discount. What I try to do is mix it up.
I’ll send an email about a service but then I’ll send an email about a video that I did which is really not selling anything just tips on computer related things like tips on buying a computer. We can send out tips about your phone, new things about iOS, news and things like that. Kind of set up a newsletter.
Newsletters
The second type of email I don’t like the form of the newsletter so much because it’s so cookie cutter. I think it just takes away some of personalization there so just think of that when you’re gonna be sending your emails. Consider it as informational and then sales focused. Don’t break it down into those four. You’re just gonna provide some info and just remind them that you exist, which you need to do. Something like putting a little drop in the bucket every so often so when they do have that problem when they didn’t before, you want them to call you or look you up and go straight to you.
You don’t want them to start looking around for different services they might wind up on somebody else’s page and then the other one obviously is you know a discount or a sale depending on the industry you’re in. If you’re selling products that work out very well at this counter, then fine you’ve got a battery for a bad day or something like that. There are two ways – not leading ways, but two ways to mentally think of email. The the other part is sent frequency. That’s the biggest question and that really can’t be answered exactly because it’s gonna really depend on your product, your customer, and the industry. There are many factors but the easy answer there is you should contact your customer as frequently as you have something of value to provide.
If you are doing windows or something like that then sending them an email every week reminding that they should redo their windows in Their house, it might be a little bit of overkill but if we just had a hurricane that would probably be a good time to do that. Mike said that email about your windows, leaky toilets and submarine windows and you’re gonna be warm which will cause your electricity bill to be high because they’re not probably sealing properly. Things like that.
Create value
Think of the value that you’re providing. Depending on your industry you might be able to provide value every week. If you’re selling something then you know a coupon once a week probably is not going to bother somebody. Now if they’re interested in your product should they get email addresses from somewhere that is not really your customer? That would become a problem for example if you’re selling let’s say women’s shoes and your customer just bought in an email list or swiped or something like that and you’re sending out a coupon every week for that you’re probably gonna have to haul them in the opt-out. So that’s not a good strategy.
You really want to think this through. You know the days of just spamming are gone and you see what sticks is not really good strategy anymore. With so many tools nowadays you can be more precise and that’s pretty much all the marketing that’s going on now, just wait for targeting if you have a product like say women’s shoes and men’s shoes or you know different things like that and segment those email. Separate the wind that way when you’re sending out a coupon for women’s shoes you’re not really bothering the guys about it although maybe they might buy something for their spouse.
Email Marketing Providers
Basically, you got to just take all these things for when you’re doing that email campaign, create ways to do the email campaigns there’s a plenty of providers out there. Some start as low as free. MailChimp is one that’s what I currently use. They are free up to about up to 2,000 emails a month and are less invasive. Inter-services which is great mm for most small businesses you may not have that so you can take advantage. Once you go over the 2,000 emails then there’s a charge. I believe it’s just about 30 bucks a month or something like that. So take a look at that. It’s not the only provider and I don’t get any money for pictures or anything like that.
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