Tag Archive for: Email Marketing

Are Your Emails Leaving Money On The Table?

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In This Article I’ll Share One of the Most Overlooked and Mis-Used Ways to Increase Sales. It’s also something your competition will most likely NOT do.

One of the most underutilized marketing tools in businesses these days is the use of emails.

If you have 5000 people on an email list and you increase the effectiveness of your results by 5%, then you will have 250 MORE people that want to buy from you. Multiply 250 x how much a customer is worth to you. If you sell a higher end product or are a professional service business, and a customer is worth $10k to you, then you are leaving up to $2,500,000 on the table.

What about if you sell supplements or info products and have a bigger list?

Let’s say you have a list of 50,000 people, you sell a $50 product and 15% of the people open emails. Now suppose you increase results by 5%, then that means you have an EXTRA 2500 people reading your emails. (Please note, I typically like to see 30% open rate on emails so I downplayed the example here)

If an extra 2500 people that are already on your list but are ignoring your emails (or worse, you’re not emailing them), if these people buy your $50 product, then you have added up to $125,000 in sales.

To get these results, it does not require adspend and it multiplies the effectiveness of everything else you do. You just have to become a little better at something you are already doing.

Do I have your attention? Do you want to take some of that money off the table?

Everyone is always looking for the “next thing”. Since we have expertise in helping clients find, bring, nurture and sell people, clients always ask me “what is the next thing we should do?”

Here are some numbers that will boggle your mind and cause your pulse to quicken…

In my friend Ian Brodie’s book titled “Email Persuasion”, he cited these stats: “When the Direct Marketing Association studied the effectiveness of various types of marketing, email came out way on top with a return on investment of around 41 to 1. Nearly twice that of any other approach.

When data analytics firm Custora published the results of their 4-year study into the online buying patterns of over 72 million customers across 14 different industries, they showed that over 40 times as many purchases came from links in emails than from Facebook or Twitter.”

Ok. so how do you do it?

…. with effective email marketing.

Let me tell you a story…

I suffer from a constant conundrum. In my professional life working with clients, my tendency is to be bottom line pure information. In my personal life, I like to laugh, play, have fun and tell stories, especially with my wife and 4 kids.

So what’s the conundrum?

Someone told me a long time ago that “people buy from people”. If the whole relationship I have with my clients and my email list is purely professional and purely informational, then how much of a relationship do I have?

If I’m so focused on facts, figures and “how-to’s” (all important) that I forget to be personable with clients and my email list, then a relationship is NOT created.

I recently had someone say to me, “I wanted to work with you because of the pictures of your family on your website. You look like a nice guy that knows his stuff.” People will come to you for your knowledge and stick with you for the substance of who you are. (That’s how it is with dating and marriage too isn’t it?)

Shameless confession, I used to write a weekly email newsletter diligently for years until I got burnt out. It was great at the beginning because I started by telling stories and entertaining while educating. Then I switched to “How to’s”…

  • How to double the number of leads from your website with one strategy you can implement in the next hour
  • How to get a continuous and never-ending flow of high quality leads to your professional practice for $20 each
  • How to 10x traffic and conversions while cutting costs and minimizing risk
  • How to – ugh, if this is all you do you will get burned out too!!!

I got tired of the how to’s. I got burned out. I wasn’t having fun. I was beginning to feel like a mechanical robot.

And when I was doing purely “how-to’s”, the feedback and comments I got dwindled significantly – you could say it fell faster than a fat boy falling off a cliff! :)

… meaning – the people I was emailing got burned out too.

To make your email marketing effective, yes, have pitch content, have “how-to’s”, and please, please, please, please, please have the personal touch.

When you do this, you will be pleasantly surprised at how your sales (and enjoyment) will increase.

To your success,

Blessings eh!

P.S. Opt-outs are ok. They will happen. If people opt-out because you are being who you are, then what are the chances they would stick around and purchase from you and be a good client or customer?

 

 

To Buy, Or Not to Buy…

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To paraphrase Shakespeare:

To Buy, Or Not to Buy: That is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in your business to buy a list and suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous spam laws,
Or to take arms against a sea of spam troubles
And by opposing, end them. To rent: to sleep
And by a sleep to say: “We will not face massive fines and risk having our site blacklisted”

… Ok, what’s up with the Shakespeare you say? (in case you didn’t pick that up it is from Hamlet) My kids have been studying Shakespeare and for some odd reason I remembered that soliloquy from high school and thought it might fit here.

You might be saying, “Thanks for the Shakespeare Chris, but what the heck are you talking about?!!”

I have been getting a lot of questions lately about buying email lists that you can blast to. As you know I’m a big believer in email marketing and blasts ONLY if they are done right. Done right, you get a surge in traffic and sales. Done wrong, it’s a waste of everybody’s time.

One of the biggest questions I get from clients is “Should I buy or rent an email list?”

Certainly buying a list looks more attractive BUT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THE WHOLE PICTURE BEFORE YOU DECIDE WHAT TO DO.  You could be facing grave penalties.

Let me explain…

Renting a list: When you rent the list, the company that owns the list blasts it out for you. They make their money by keeping a high integrity list of confirmed email lists where most (if not all) of the people have opted in to receive information. They will continue to refresh, update and rent the list. This is the bread and butter of their business. Advantages are high deliverability with no risk of spam. Downside is it’s more expensive as you pay per blast. Many good list brokers will limit your risk by only charging for emails that were confirmed delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

Buying a list – you own it. No idea how the emails were harvested. Purchased lists have high bounce and spam rates. Purchased lists can also be very old with poor deliverability, they could have been developed by a sweatshop of people in India scanning websites for email addresses and adding them to their list, or even to an extreme where someone could have stolen a list and are trying to pawn it off on some poor unsuspecting person. If you buy a list, no software provider will do the blast for you. Reputable off-the-shelf email blast companies like Constant Contact, Aweber, and Infusionsoft (the one I use), clearly state in their terms and conditions that you agree NOT to blast a purchased list; they will revoke your software license if you do.

If you buy a list, you have to search very hard to find a 3rd party that will blast it for you. They are very few and they defer all legal responsibility to you. Fines are $16,000 per spam blast, plus, you run the risk of getting your website blacklisted from the internet. Very severe stuff. If you buy a list, there is no way to effectively blast it without serious implications. A lot of companies that sell lists will paint a nice sales picture but they don’t tell you how to send it. They paint a nice rosy picture and that’s about it. Advantage to buying a list is you own the list and can sleep with a false sense of security that you have something great (you don’t). Downside is you can’t blast it, and if you do you run the risk of serious fines and getting kicked off the internet.

After going through this with clients they decided not to buy lists. By the way, this question comes up all the time. There are many people that will try to sell you lists. My advice – RUN!!

Bottom line: Renting an email list is the only way to go.

Bottom line #2: Renting an email list is a great way to get business, if (and this is a big IF) you have a powerful lead generation magnet to drive the opt-in. (I covered this topic in a free mini-course “5 Days to Success With Internet Marketing“)

Hope this helps.

Blessings,