Do you ask customers for their email address?

If collecting emails seems like hard work, here’s a re-cap on why email marketing is worthwhile.

5 reasons why email marketing rocks:

1. It’s the golden ticket

Websites, Apps and Social Media platforms may come and go, but email isn’t going anywhere. The entire internet is built on the premise that individuals have an email address – and this piece of info is your golden ticket to reaching them in their home, at their work and in their hand.

2. It’s direct

These days you can’t rely on customers going out of their way to contact you. Customers are busy, so a gentle reminder that you exist can often be the nudge they need – especially if they’ve been already been thinking about contacting you.

3. It’s yours

Who owns your Linkedin connections? Linkedin do.

Who owns your Facebook fans? Facebook do.

Rather than renting your audience from a social media juggernaut, build your own list that you can access when you choose.

4. It’s repeat business

The customer that purchased from you yesterday went out of their way to do so. Are you going to let them walk off into the sunset in the hope that they’ll return one day? Or are you going to keep in touch and explain why it’s worth coming back?

5. It’s low cost

Whatever sales/marketing blog you read, they all conclude that email marketing is still the best performing medium in terms of return on investment (ROI).

Here are a couple of articles on the subject if you’re interested (just to prove I’m not fibbing!)

• Adestra: The 2014 email marketing industry census
• Copyblogger: Email marketing ROI

Still not collecting email addresses?

Forget your ‘dog ate my homework‘ excuse and get cracking.

Yes it takes time to build an email list – but you’ve got the start somewhere!

7 ways to collect email addresses from your customers.

1. Run a competition where the winner is announced by email
2. Use a CRM to automatically collect email addresses (I use Capsule CRM)
3. Start a business card draw
4. Add an email newsletter signup form to your website
5. Add ’email’ as a field on your new customer or account application form
6. Incentivise your staff to collect them (I’m talking rewards!)
7. Build email into your business process (for example, appointment reminders via email)

Use, don’t abuse!

Yes, having your customers email address is awesome. But if you’re going to ram sales messages down your customers throat then you might as well not bother at all. For more on this topic, see my recent selling vs helping article.

As François-Marie Arouet once said, “With great power comes great responsibility”

Happy emailing!

Cheers, Dan

Do you send email newsletters to your clients?

Email newsletters are a great way to reach your customers, but if you’ve been doing it like I have then you’ve been doing it wrong.

Here’s how my email newsletter used to look (Example A)

Example A:

The problem with the example above?

• The email is too long (who likes reading long emails?)
• It looks like it’s from a business (rather than a person)
• There is no logical next step for the recipient

But the main problem with the example above is that it’s only an email – an email that will disappear into an inbox somewhere and never see the light of day again.

On a brighter note, check out my new approach below (Example B)

Example B:

What’s different with this second example?

• It’s much shorter
• It feels like it’s from a person (rather than a business)
• It links to a blog article (instead of having all of the text in the body of the email newsletter)

That’s right, the text that would normally be within the email newsletter is now a blog article instead.

And here’s why this approach is better:

• Website visitors can now read it (not just email subscribers)
• My website now has fresh content (which google likes!)
• It’s easier to ignore (if a recipient that isn’t interested in a particular topic area)

Could your business benefit from this approach?

In most circumstances there’s no reason why your website (and the world) shouldn’t get the benefit of the regular content you’re creating – and it’s as simple as writing helpful blog articles, and linking to them using email.

My only words of caution for this link to article approach are for:

• Retail or price-driven businesses where consumers only need a product name and price
• Sensitive information that you only want your email recipients to read

Hungry for the stats? Here are the results from each of the example campaigns, courtesy of simplemail.co.nz

Example A Statistics: Long email newsletter

Example B Statistics: Short email newsletter linking to blog article

As you can see, the shorter link to article approach creates ‘clicks’, allowing you to see which topics are of most interest to your recipients (so you can write more on those topics!)