Email Marketing

We randomly interupt our 5 stages of marketing backward flow to insert this piece which covers so very many of the marketing stages.

Sorry in advance for the overload. I could write an entire course just on this, so I will attempt to contain it as best as I can.

Yes, I am a big proponent of email marketing. Nothing gives you as high of an ROI if you do it right, and doing it right just involves knowing a couple things, and being yourself.

Email trumps social media by a landslide, yet most of you spend the majority of your time social networking. Twitter's current engagement rate is 2.5 percent, and Facebook's is heading that direction. Email however, is something everybody checks, and usually multiple times a day. Facebook will not show your post to everyone, but they will see your email. They might choose to delete without opening, but at least that is a conscious decision on their part unlike social sites who don't give your prospects the option.

Wanna make a thousand dollars by writing an email?

There's an old saying amongst marketers; "The money's in the list." A rule of thumb that is out there is that your income per month can be predicted by your number of subscribers. One person is worth about $1. This is to be taken with a huge grain of salt of course, because it depends on what you do with your list that gets you money. Once you've built yours up a bit, it becomes an incredible asset where you become confident that if you need to drum up some cash, you can send out an email.

The above is a screen shot of my store revenue. The peaks are days I sent an email, the valleys are days I didn't.

Email helps you solidify the "know, like and trust" factor. People can't process all your awesomeness at once. They need small frequent dosages at first until they're hooked. For that to happen, you need to stay on their radar and email is a great way to do that. Many times, I'll visit a site and get curious, but not enough to actually do anything. I don't really want to bookmark it, yet I'm not wanting to totally forget about it either. So I'll get on their mailing list so I can feel them out a bit more.

Pick a service

If you do not have an email service provider (ESP) yet, you need to get one. For those of you who are not in ecommerce, I recommend Mailerlite. I'm pushing Mailerlite because it's free and it has an autoresponder. There are better companies, and when your business gets really going, and you have an extra $60 a month laying around, you may want to switch to something that has really smart personalization capabilities. Just make sure you or an employee has the time to learn and take advantage of all that's there. For ecommerce Klayvio is top notch and what I use. Omnisend is just a hair below and has a decent free plan.

You cannot simply run this out of your personal email and send to all your contacts. There are very specific laws around email marketing and being in violation of them is a $40,000 fine per occurance. Even if you send an email to 20 people, that's $800,000 dollars. Yes, people do this. It's still wrong.

What's an autoresponder?

Autoresponders do much more than send an automated email upon sign up. Yes, it does that, but for our purposes, we want them to do much much more. My autoresponder, for example, emails people a sequence of several months worth of emails. It delivers my 7 day mini-course, and then weekly ones after that, all of which educate my customers about my product, how I do business and gives glimpses into who I am. It also sends emails based upon what products people purchase, thereby helping them get the most out of it. For those who order a custom combo, it begins the consultation process. It follows up with people who have put items in their cart and rabbit trailed away from completing the checkout process. It checks in with people who haven't bought anything in a while, and it knows when to offer a coupon, and when not to. It helps me onboard new practitioners, new affiliates and new wholesalers.

Without an autoresponder, your new subscribers get signed up and thrown into a broadcast email situation with everybody else. They don't get the benefit of what you've written in the past, and you're stuck trying to write for a broad audience, rather than tailoring a few emails for newbies, and writing the rest on a level that applies to those who already know you.

Every email you write that isn't time sensitive can go onto the end of your autoresponder. At the stage I am, I'm no longer striving to crank out emails. They hear from me early and often, then when they run out of autoresponder awesomeness, they don't hear from me as much. By then they've either bought, or they probably aren't interested. In either case, they don't need to see me in their inbox as often. I've made my impression.

Autoresponders help you "onboard" people properly. What are some questions you get asked over and over again? What do you want to tear your hair out over because you spend all your time explaining it? What will help your customer be more of a joy to work with? If you are familiar with Sandi Krakowski, her Be More message came out of that. It was actually people's emotional hang-ups that got in the way, so she started hammering out the positive, affirming messages. I decided I wanted smarter customers, so I teach. What will help you? What will help you that people will like?

What do your customers need at the introductory stage? I've even seen people say something like "Hey, I have tons of info on my site, but here are my most popular posts. People seem to really like these, so I didn't want you to miss out."

You also could link them to a private page that has a deal that's only for new subscribers, just to see if you can't get them into an initial low cost sale. Psychology says if they can get past the first one, they'll buy from you again.

Frequency

Another reason you need an autoresponder is because you really need to be emailing them right after they sign up. If they sign up and nothing happens until a month later, they forget who you are, that they signed up, and you might get reported as spam. Make an impression early on. Once a month is too infrequent by the way. Once a week is great and daily is not too much. I start out emailing daily. The moment they sign up with you is when they are the most enthused about you, so keep that going.

Welcome

One way to hit em early is with a good welcome email. This used to be mine, and is still a good one to throw up that doesn't take much time to implement.

Subject line - Questions about flower essences?

Hey <<First Name>>

I'm Seneca, essence maker at Freedom Flowers. I noticed you signed up for the mini-course and I just wanted to let you know that I'm here if you have questions. At any time you can always just hit reply to the email and I'll be on the other side of that, reading. Don't hesitate to fire off a reply if something isn't clear.

Blessings,

Seneca

This starts establishing me as a real person, and if I can actually get them to reply, that almost guarantees that my emails won't land in their spam folder in the future.

Other Transactional Emails

These types of emails have the highest open rates, yet are the most ignored by businesses. I'm talking about "confirm your subscription" emails, order confirmations, shipping confirmations, etc. These have some pre-written content in them that you should really tweak to fit your personality. That is your brand. These are also places you can drop a call to action such as checking out your Facebook page or linking them to a piece of content that's appropriate for where they are at with you.

Give vs Sell

There is a school of thought out there, that is anti-hard sell. This is extremely prevalent in internet marketing, that selling turns people off, and you need to give give give and provide lots of value, get them to love you and then you can make them an offer. This generally looks like about 4 emails of you being awfully generous, followed by a pitch. They cite the Law of Reciprocity which means that if you give upfront, they will feel a certain sense of obligation and give you something back. I think that this used to be true, and probably still is in offline marketing, but there's so much free stuff to be had now, that people expect it. I have no qualms about taking your free stuff.

Give, give give

The problem with the "give give give" method is that you attract, and you train people to take. This is only my opinion of course, and what I say flies completely against most gurus, so sort this out for yourself, but if you have expectant takers, as soon as you ask them to buy, they get hostile.

Sell, sell, sell

Where the gurus have it correct, is why would anybody stay subscribed to get nothing but sales pitches in your inbox?

So do you give or do you sell?

Both.

Give, but make it clear that you're in business. I get a newsletter from this internet marketing guy and listen to his long in-depth podcasts. It's great info, but I actually have no idea what he's selling. Does he consult? Does he have a course? I haven't been back to his website to even know. Update: Since I've written this, he is now talking about what he's selling. It's not a pitch, but it's quite clear what it is and what the benefits are, and it's in every podcast and email.

I have written maybe two emails where I am not selling in them. Am I an obnoxious salesman? Not typically. I sell in the context of giving. I teach, I give tips and I say "Hey, this works really well for that. You should probably get it." Occasionally, and mostly just during product launches or special promotions, I do a hard sell, where the whole email is nothing but pitch. It's rare, and it usually makes me lots of sales. I don't think I could get away with it often, but maybe more often than I do.

Sign up forms

Most email service providers have ugly sign up forms! If you have WordPress, there are all kinds of plugins that integrate with various email providers. Ugly is better than none though, so just get it done.

Popups are really effective. You can present an offer and get it right in their face! Nothing gets sign ups like a popup. The better ones can be set to be less annoying. Having them go off as soon as you get on the site is stupid. They just got there, they don't know if they're ready to commit yet. Let em read around a bit and then let it deploy. You also don't want it going off every time they click a new page. Some popups have what's called "exit intent". These go off when they detect your surfer is about to leave your site. You might use that to make them an offer they can't refuse. Please note that exit intent doesn't work on phones or tablets. Smarter software will also you to put a pop up only for mobile viewers and exit intent for desktop. I also like the slide ins that show up when you get to the bottom of the page. I've digested all your content, now I'm ready for my next step and I'm willing to look at a popup.

Popups are effective, just use them sparingly and wisely.

Double vs Single opt-in

This debate rages over which is better. Double opt-in means that not only do they have to sign up, they then have to click a "yes, I really did want this" link in their email. People are lousy at follow through, so I don't like double opt-in. The counter argument is that you have fewer, but better quality subscribers with a double opt-in. Meaning, they know how to follow directions and really really want to be on your list. They battle through.

If your ESP requires double opt-in, you can get around this by making a sign up form through a plugin, or a form builder like wufoo or another that integrates with your ESP to get around the double opt-in.

Friend or pro

Most ESP's have nice templates and themes. I don't use them.

The camp I fall into, is that I want to come across friendly and personal. This means not looking too slick with color schemes and graphics, like something a mass marketing company would put out. As we check our email more and more on mobile, all of that stuff doesn't load anyway so that we preserve data. I want mine to resemble more of a letter to a friend written on some stationary. They generally start out with me addressing them by their first name, or sometimes not even that formal where I just dive in and use their name somewhere else in the body. I sign it "Seneca."

I feel my business warrants that. Not much is more personal than people's hurts and feelings. I don't need to look professional as bad as I need to be friends.

You might need to look professional. Especially if you're in graphics, tech or anything where visuals are really important. You can personalize or not and still be slick.

You will need to decide how you want to come across. Neither way is wrong, and one way will be more appropriate for your business.

Which ever way you go, you still need to write these as if you were writing to one person. A blog post is for the masses. An email is a personal letter from you, to the one reading it. Get the broadcast idea out of your head, and just write to the one.

Opt-in bribes

It's not enough to say "sign up for my newsletter." You need to give a little more of a reason. You need to think of something you can give as a bribe for signing up. Many sites have a free e-book. This used to be a good thing, but now we're all swimming in them, can't read all our free ebooks and it's no longer the best strategy unless perhaps you're an author. Thank goodness!

Now what we need to to write is something simple, easy to digest that will get them results. I used to have a "4 Steps to a Revolutionary Life" PDF. I still use it, but now it's part of my 7 Day Flower Essence Mini-Course where you learn all about using essences for you and the whole family. Before I wrote anything, I had a drawing for a free Bouquet Blend of choice to subscribers. Other ideas are coupons, checklists, guides, samples, how-to's. It doesn't need to be nearly as gargantuan as writing an ebook, and your autoresponder can deliver it.

What it should do, is be extremely helpful, relevant and a good introduction to your business. It's a first impression, so think it through and execute with precision. But don't get too hung up here, you can always do something better later.

Etsy/Amazon/Other Marketplace sellers
You do need your own website, but if that is what keeps tripping you up from getting email signups, you can throw up a landing page to get people opted in to your list. Ideally you would build this whereever your future website plans are going to be, but you can also just do a simple Wix page with an opt-in bribe to get going. You'll be pretty limited because it's hard to get people to visit a page where the only thing to do is sign up. You can put your opt-in offer in physical packages to try and get customers to sign up, and you can promote it on social media.

The rub here is that you cannot run your email marketing from your yahoo, hotmail, gmail or other personal account. To play with ESP's, you have to be a real business with a real business email. Gotta grow up sometime! The easiest cheapest way to handle this is to take that step towards setting up your website and buy a domain name. You can get business email through your domain registrar or you can set up G-Suite, which is the solution I recommend if you need to be HIPAA compliant. Most website hosting includes email for free if you're committing to hosting.

Essential Homework

Get your software picked out, and get your sign up forms up on your website!

Brainstorm on what your opt-in bribe can be!

Write a welcome letter and get it scheduled to be automatically delivered when a new subscriber signs up.

Lets address tech issues on the call.

Optional Homework

Map out three emails to kick off an autoresponder.

If you are retaking this class or already have this done,

It's probably time to kick things up a notch. There are lots of ways to do this and we'll start with segmentation. Segmenting your emails helps you to deliver more personalized messages to people which increases your open and click rates and consequently, sales. This basically means that you don't treat everyone the same, but send different groups of people different stuff. The easiest way to start segmenting is by customers and prospects. For instance if they click on a link to my Yarrow Shield in an email, they can then get other emails about being sensitive or an empath etc. You do this via the autoresponder. If they buy Fragment Finder, they get emailed good info that helps them get the most out of that essence.