Why bother with email marketing?

Why Bother With Email Marketing?

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About The Author

XO Digital Marketing aims to help main street businesses marketing themselves in the

digital age. Building a local online presence is not impossible & can be more affordable

than traditional marketing. It is far more interactive and allows the people and

personality of your business to shine through.

We provide a full range of marketing solutions to help bridge the technology &

marketing gap for entrepreneurs to focus on their people and products. Need help

attracting new local clients? Need help getting repeat business? We can help on both

fronts.

We hope you find our ebooks helpful in teaching and training you on various aspects of

digital marketing that you can employ today to increase your bottom line. We provide

both baseline and advanced techniques to help no matter what level you are currently

operating at.


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Why bother with email marketing?

Make a personable brand connection

Change your customer/prospects perceptions

People who opt in to emails are known to spend more than other consumers.

With the noise of digital marketing growing louder and louder, and peoples inbox getting

more junk every day, it's imperative that you know how to make a connection with

people who know like and trust you. Look at this infographic below.


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As you can clearly see email marketing can still be a powerful tool. The first step in

running an effective email campaign starts with one obvious but often difficult task for

most companies. Collecting email addresses. I have provided a breakdown of different

ways to gather emails and I want to encourage you to create a strategy for making it a

part of your company culture. One place to start immediately would be some simply

changes to your website. Make sure you have an easy and quick form that people can

fill out that asks for their email. There is no good silver bullet approach I am afraid the

most effective way is simply a lot of work. Though I do believe that this work is a good

use of time and will produce money making results in the long term.

Can you find routines in your office that eat a lot of time and have no real long term

value? Evaluating these processes may prove to be the key to finding the time to

implementing the strategies below.

The best approach is to use a combination of all of these approaches, leaning heavily

on making it a daily part of your routine, every time you talk with a customer. I wouldn't

use any of the paid strategies in place until I had the internal phone and in person

scripts in place. Make sure to have an overall strategy with tactics as a part of that

strategy. Make sure to have your whole team on board with this strategy. If you simply

throw out some of these tactics without a plan, you will find that you have wasted a lot of

time and money.

If you understand all of this but have struggled in the past, use this as motivation to get

started today. If you are solid on email gathering, great! You can move on to another

step.

The 1st and most important step in getting going would be to properly communicate the

importance to the business in having email addresses. Explain the purpose and

relationship to the bottom line of the business.

Sample Ways to Gather Email Addresses

• Just Ask

• Send a Letter

• Send a Postcard

• Incentives

• Provide consequences and rewards

• Check your outlook, yahoo, gmail etc

• Scripts and practice


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• Voice Broadcast

Sending a Letter to Your Database:

Send this sample letter via mail merge in Word Doc with a self addresses stamped

envelope.

Have an Intern or admin enter this information into your email marketing system.

January 28, 2013

<Customer Name>

<Address Line 1> <Address Line 2>

<City>, <State> <Zip Code>

RE: Confidential Client Information

Dear <Customer Name>,

Thank you for your business! In order to better serve you, we are asking for your help.

Would you be so kind to take a minute and fill out the contact information below? We

have included a postage paid, self addressed envelope for

your convenience. Thank you in advance for your time!

Sincerely,

<Your Name>

<Your Title>

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Business Name: ________________________________________________________

1st Key Contact Person/Title/e-mail address:

______________________________________________________________________

_

2nd Contact Person/Title/e-mail address:

______________________________________________________________________

_


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3rd Contact Person/Title/e-mail address:

______________________________________________________________________

_

Postcard Tear Off:

Send this postcard to everyone in your database without an email address.

Consider your average customer before doing this, and consider running a contest as a

part of this strategy to increase participation.

If you get some results with one competition, consider making it a regular thing until you

achieve the results you want.

Consequences and Rewards:

It takes consequences and rewards to truly change behavior. If your staff just asked on

every call you would start gathering email addresses at no additional cost. You need to

reward your team for good behavior and provide consequences when a team member

does not follow your directives. Also it's a great idea to put some posters in the office to

remind the team they need to always be asking!

Consequences:

1. Make it part of their job description. This is now a requirement! It's not optional.

2. Install a tracking mechanism. This can be as simple as writing it on a piece of paper

submitted daily to track who is collecting them!

3. Make the consequences clear. If they do not gather an email address:

• Write them up

• Decrease their bonus

• Terminate them

Rewards:

1. Create an incentive or bonus plan for collecting the most emails.

2. Make it personal. If you know what your staff likes (money, days off, gift cards, a big

prize drawing), then you can motivate them.


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3. Track it. When they know you are watching, they will WANT to impress you!

4. Example, payout $1 per email address. When you hit 100 emails: $100 prize!

Competition: Make it a competition! The first person to get to a target number of emails

wins a prize.

Sample Competition Plan

Email Gathering Program & Contest:

• We need more emails!

• We still have less than 1,000 emails.

• EVERYONE needs to make collecting emails a HIGH PRIORITY!!!

• ASK FOR AN EMAIL ON EVERY PHONE CALL.

What Emails Do We Want?

1. Emails of existing clients.

2. Emails of employees of top prospects.

3. Emails of friends, acquaintances and family. You email marketing tool should have a

way to differentiate prospects, make sure you do. That way you can send different types

of emails to them.

4. Emails of any new prospects you are talking to - of course!!

What do you have to do?

1. Keep a legal pad or steno pad on your desk solely for collecting email addresses.

2. Write down every new email you get on it - any email for any customer, prospect

or friend.

3. Add into your email marketing system at the end of every day.

4. If you get a long list of emails, utilize an admin or intern to enter them into the

system.

5. TIP!! Open a new email window and put "a" into the "to:" field. Look through all

the emails and write down those we don't have, and then go to "b", etc. Add

friends, clients, or anyone else living nearby that could be a prospect.

Sample Incentive Plan:


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Your baseline is that you are expected to collect at least ONE NEW EMAIL EVERY

WORK DAY. That means you need to collect at least 22 emails a month.

There are at least 10 of us who should be collecting emails. SO, if we exceed our goal

of collecting 220 emails in a month, the employee with the most NEW emails will

receive a gift card for $50. The employee with the second most emails will receive a gift

card for $25. We will do this promotion for at least SIX MONTHS!

Just Ask!

The concept is simple. Every incoming phone call is a sales opportunity and it needs to

be maximized!

iPad

Have an office iPad and whenever someone comes in have them complete an online

contact form to grab that email address! Bring the iPad to business events, etc., to

collect those email addresses.

Scripts and Practice

Practice makes perfect so you should role play asking for email addresses with your

staff. Here are some sample scripts:

If the customer says "NO" here's what you can say to ask for it:

"The reason we ask for an email address is 3 fold:

1. We've found this to be the primary way our customers prefer to be communicated to.

2. We also offer specific promotional and discount opportunities to all our valued online

customers.

3. And all of us here at <COMPANY NAME> are making a huge effort to GO GREEN

and do our part to save the environment and go paperless.

Voice Broadcast:

A voice broadcast is a also referred to as a robo-call; an automated call recording that

goes out to your clients that you do not have an email address for to get them to update

their contact information. These calls can be controlled to go as slow as you want and

on certain days so your team can keep up with the volume of call-ins.


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Once you have a good system in place to collect email addresses, the next step is

understanding some of the metrics associated with email sending. Here are two metrics

that we are going to set as our goal and focus for the time being.

1. Open Rate - Like the name implies the open rate is the percentage of opens a

campaign email received after it is sent. The average open rate for all industries

combined in the US hovers around 20%.

2. Click Through Rate (CTR) - This is the percentage of times that a person clicks a link

to your website after it has been opened. This averages around 3%.

Even though we are going to measure the effectiveness of both metrics, our primary

focus will be on the Open Rate of your email campaigns; assuming that we can get

more people to want to open them the CTR will take care of itself.

The first step to getting superior open rates is to avoid getting labeled as spam. Some

very simply ways to do that are avoid using all capital letters and don’t use too many

exclamation points. Other items that spam filters look for are free offers, money back

guarantees, make lots of money, and a host of other very simple things that all of us

would recognize. Many email service providers provide some good guidelines on this.

Definitely spend 15-20 minutes to read it, it will help you over and over again.

It is easier to reach someone who you have had communication with. They may have

gotten a quote from you or bought something from you already. These people tend to

be better on both fronts, they tend to be easier to sell again & they tend to open

communications from you. already have than to burn through new leads who don't know

you.

I am going to give you 3 steps to increase the open rate.

1. UN-Automate the Automation

At least partially. Just because your email marketing system has canned email

templates, doesn't mean that you shouldn’t put thought into what you are sending your

customers. It may even have some automated email triggers. This is to simply tee up

your email content, for you to knock it out of the park. Also automation makes it really

tempting to send a bunch of emails all of the time. The quickest way to get

unsubscribed is to send too many emails. Unless of course it's understood by the

consumer what they will be receiving. For example an instructional email course or you

say in the first email "You will be getting one email a week." On average however, I

recommend sending no more than 15-17 automated emails, per customer, per year.

Direct emails to the customer for billing questions or issues do not count.


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When setting up your campaign emails, write as if you are writing to one person for the

entire year.

What emails would you want them to read, and then write them into the campaign. The

system will send them to everyone else for years following. It's not that hard to write 15

emails for the entire year is it?

2. Value your customer

Open your personal email Inbox, and read the junk that you have, and then read the

emails from companies that you look forward to reading to yourself. Now reverse that as

the sender of emails.

Which one are you contributing to? Most companies only think of what they can get out

of an email, or social media. The successful ones ask how they can serve their clients

better.

If you design email campaigns to serve the customer then your open rate will go up. It

may take some time to figure how to do that, but it can be done. Become a good listener

to what your client needs, and see if you can package some assistance in the form of a

digital email that you can deliver. Once you start listening you can adjust and refine

based on response.

3. Tell them to expect your email

Once you have designed 15 custom (but automated) emails, then tell them about it.

When you have them at your place of business or on the phone , tell them that in a

couple of days you should receive an email from us very soon.

You can tell them that is the preferred method of communication that your clients have

asked for, and that they should expect a welcome/thank you email soon. BTW you don't

have to tell them it's automated. The emails should seem very personal.

Tell them that this email has a lot of highly valuable resources that many of your

customers have found helpful. This is assuming you have put together something great

for them. Ask them to add you to their contact list once they get the first email, so it

doesn't go to spam.

This first email should really crush it, in terms of offering value to your customer. This

will set you up for success in the long run.

ho sent in your questions about email marketing. We will be sharing with you our

suggestions on how to avoid the Spam folder.


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So below we have listed 10 more tips to help you increase your visibility and at the

same time

potentially increasing your open write.

What to avoid?

1. Avoid opting clients in unless they have given you some type of permission. (when

using the email term to "opt-in" we will assume it to mean to sign up with a readers

permission. )

2. Buying blind email lists from list providers (make sure they have opted in). These can

be a way to get prospects into your system but expect the spam ratio to go up and drop

your open rate. If you do buy a list, don’t inundate them with emails. Keep the separate

till them show interest, then add move them into more regular campaigns.

3. Letting go of too much information in one email, keep it brief and intriguing enough to

navigate them to the next step.

4. Using the same "Thank You" subject line for the majority of your emails. Be

thoughtful and creative with each subject line.

5. Pay attention to your key players and be sure to follow-up personally.

6. Sending the same message over and over. Change it up!

7. Isolate your campaign's messages and not connecting them to your physical

networking efforts.

8. Be sure all your marketing communications efforts are connected and saying the

same thing.

9. Useless content to the reader.

10. Avoid Using Spammy Keywords .

Keywords and phrases to NOT to use in email marketing campaigns:

• Free

• As seen on

• Call free

• Promise


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• No gimmick

• No refund

• Get it now

• Winner

• Congratulations

• $$$

• Free money


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Conclusion

Digital Marketing encompasses many different but related tasks that are necessary to

for success of your business. A great many business owners have not yet taken these

strategies seriously and have not achieved optimal results in there market.

If you are a small business trying to build a brand in today’s world, the time is now to

begin this journey to build your online presence to reach your consumers. Some of

these items in this e-book you may be able to tackle some of these on your own, others

you may want to hire others to do for you.

Visit our website at www.xodigitalmarketing.com to see if there are ways in which we

can help you get started.

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Or Digital Marketing Consulting, where we teach you how to market yourself

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