I have a question for you. Do you want to know what the most affordable and most useful marketing tool is? A tool that can give you potentially the biggest return on your investment by a country mile?
And I am being serious. You may be saying “Well duh, of course I want to know what THAT is!!!”
But believe me, when I give my answer, people get deflated. I get this, ‘oh really’ with a sigh response from people. Like when you were a kid and open a birthday present that you didn’t want.
I still remember the scarring effects of my 10th birthday. My mother decided I was too old for a kiddie party so we had a family party instead. All the grandparents, aunts and uncles were there with beautifully wrapped gifts for me. Awweee yeah baby!!!
All I wanted was the Steve Austin Rocket Ship. That sucker was cool. You pop your Six Million Dollar Man in his cool orange jump suit in and hours of fun. Go Google it. Yes, I’m old.
Look at this thing! I still want it!!!
I could barely contain myself. Ripped open the wrapping paper on the first gift. Was it the rocket ship? No it was not. It was underwear. Thanks grandma! Just what a 10 year old wants.
That’s the reaction I get when I tell people email marketing is the most powerful, cheapest, easiest marketing tool in your arsenal. I get looked at like I just bought them underwear.
Email marketing isn’t sexy. Some sneaky Facebook ad trick is sexy. A Google traffic secret is sexy.
It may be like underwear but hey, underwear is pretty darn useful when you get right down to it.
But email marketing is dead
With the rise of social media, experts proclaimed the early death of email. Communication happens in real time now. Right?
Wrong!
Now, here’s the thing. Email marketing is part of a bigger picture. Great marketing is never about one thing. It’s about doing many things to achieve the desired result.
Social media is actually a great way to communicate. I’m not knocking it at all. It has its place.
But go put a post out on your Facebook page without paying to boost it and let me know how many people saw it.
Go ahead. I’ll wait here.
Are you back?
So how many of your 2k fans saw your post? Oh… three you say? Very good. Keep at it.
The best use of social media in my opinion is as a means to get people on your email list. I’ve been doing email marketing for over ten years and not once did my provider ratchet down how many emails they deliver to get me to “boost” my emails so I could reach more of my list. Whoops, I hope I didn’t just give Facebook an idea.
Email is email
Email gets delivered. Sure there are bad email addresses you may have on your list, people may complain, they may opt out. There are many factors that can reduce deliverability so not everyone on your list will get your email safely in their inbox.
However, there’s no gatekeeper standing there with their hand out. There’s no one there telling you to pay or they will only deliver three emails to your list.
But the big thing here is that your email database is your email database. There is no selfish algorithm deciding how many emails get delivered if any. Yet…
What about this?
So for you more savvy social media marketers you may be saying, “Wait Mike, don’t knock Facebook. What about Groups?”
Yes, a Facebook Group is a much better way to communicate with your audience. They will actually receive the posts. They are way more likely to interact.
But the big problem is that it’s still owned by Facebook. It’s still a Facebook property.
And I have no doubt there are a bunch of hot shot nerds in Menlo Park devising a devious scheme to monetize Groups as I write this. In fact, I’d bet my last pair of clean underwear on it… Facebook may leave it alone, or they may kill deliverability of your posts. The problem is, it’s up to them not you.
One of the dumbest things any business can do is leave their marketing in the hands of a social media platform. The people who connect with you there are not your leads to keep. Which is why…
The big reason email marketing is better than social
You own it!!!
If one day Constant Contact decides that they will only deliver my emails if I give them more money, I can download my database of names and emails and take it somewhere else.
I can then get a brand new email system and upload my list within minutes. There is no other company who controls my list. It is mine and only mine.
But it doesn’t work for me (wah, wah, wah)!
This is what I hear from people all the time. Some of these people send emails weekly and even daily. They get less than a 10% open rate and they don’t get customers from it.
But then I go check their work. I start getting their emails and I see the same old boring thing.
The first thing I see is their subject lines stink. They don’t compel me to open their emails.
Of course they are disillusioned with email marketing when they get these poor open rates. They get a 12% open rate (which means only 12% of the people who see the email in their inbox open the darn thing). And then the experts say that 12% is industry average. So they think they are doing it right yet the results are so poor. What’s the point right?
But seriously it works (for me)!!!
I regularly get over 30% open rate. I have pushed over 50% open rate. And that is to my cold prospect list.
It is very possible to do double and even triple the open rate that experts claim to be good. I even created an email course that shows people how to do what I do to get those open rates.
The other big complaint-there’s more but these are the big common ones-is that people aren’t getting customers from their emails.
Let me tell you, of all the ways I market and advertise, email is by far the most effective method for getting people to take actions that create profits. By far.
The reason people aren’t getting sales and profits from their emails is the same reason they get low open rates. Because they don’t do the little important things needed to make the sale.
They send a newsletter no one reads. They send the same thing everyone else is sending. They don’t ask people to take any kind of action. They don’t create a strategy that gets people buying.
I’ll be covering these things and more in the next few blog articles so stay tuned. In the meantime, make sure to grab my new eCourse: Email Marketing Demystified
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