Justin Brooke is a really funny guy who has a great business with his wife Chaunna called Site Fling (www.sitefling.com).
I have been following Justin for a little while now and I have learnt a lot from his 'tell it like it REALLY is' blog posts and emails. He is very much like Frank Kern who is one of my favourite mentors. These guys make learning internet marketing lots of fun. (You need fun in any industry otherwise it is just a job,which becomes a chore, which stops making money!).
Anyway, he has some really great advice on email marketing which I wanted to share with you this week. I highly recommend you copying and printing off this recipe and trying to implement them in your own email strategies. Justin has proved many times that it works, most recently in an affiliate competition where he came 5th with a list of only 7,500 people over other Guru's who had lists in the 100,000 or more.
Having a strong trusting relationship with your customers will outdo 'mass customer lists' every time.
Personalisation is the key. Make everyone who has any form of contact with you and your business feel like a long lost friend and you will reap the rewards for many years to come.
The sad thing in this industry is that too many of the Guru's have become so far removed from their business and their customers that their level of service has become very substandard. Trust me I have had some really bad experiences with some really top Guru's support staff, that I have left them to follow those who take the time to get to know me and what I need.
I hope you get as much out of this post from Justin as I did.
Enjoy
Pammieb
http://www.pammieb.com
My Email Marketing Recipe
First and foremost my biggest belief is that whatever lure you used to get your subscribers with is the lure that’s going to work the best in the future to get them to respond again.
For example if all you did was offer them a freebie, then that’s really all they’ll want in the future. Sure, you’ll catch a few buyers in the midst but the majority will just be freebie seekers forever.
Now if you made them buy something to get on your list then you’ll be able to get many more of them to buy something again.
When I tell my coaching clients to stop letting people onto their list for free and instead make them buy something. The first thing they say is but then it’ll take me forever to build a big list.
IT’S NOT ABOUT A BIG LIST!! (forgive my outbursts please this topic raises my blood pressure!)
Plus, it’s entirely possible to have the same high conversions you can get with a freebie as it is with something that the browser has to buy. You just have to make sure the value of your offer is much higher then the price you are charging.
Ingredient #1 is stop letting people subscribe for free.
Out of my 7,800+ subscribers over 4,500 of them are their because they bought something from me. Which actually leads me into the next ingredient.
Just because someone has bought your products doesn’t mean that’s how the relationship should stay. There are hundreds of other marketers out there doing EVERYTHING they can think of to take your subscribers away. It’s my belief that you need to reward them well to encourage loyalty.
When someone buys from me and becomes a subscriber to my list there are 3-4 unadvertised bonuses given out immediately. I get testimonials all the time about how people are blown away at how much I give them right upfront. This helps me get them to fall in love with me and my emails.
Ingredient #2 reward your subscribers well
The last thing you want is someone scared to open one of your emails because they’re afraid you’ll talk them into buying something. What you want to create is an environment where your subscribers see one of your emails pop into their box and they open it before any of their friends emails, knowing that it’s probably something really cool you are sending them.
Which brings me to ingredient #3…
Ingredient #3 is to deliver consistent content
The majority of my subscribers know and anticipate my emails on Tuesdays and Sundays. That’s because they know that unless something’s happened to me they are getting something valuable on those days.
Every Tuesday morning we do a twenty minute long live show called “The Twenty Minute Tackle” using Ustream.tv and every Sunday night we do a blog post like the one you are reading. My open rates and click through rates on those days are through the roof.
We’ve even seen 90% click through rates, multiple times, when we hit the right topic. That’s because doing the consistent content thing does a number of things to your subscribers…
- Get’s them anticipating and expecting your email
- Gives them valuable content that they enjoy
- They respect that you’re not just another salesman
- Get’s them used to receiving your emails and clicking your links
It also lets us interact and turns our emails into a 2 way communication
Having that 2 way communication with your subscribers is super important, but I see so many marketers doing everything they can to turn it off. They use
- noreply email addresses
- force you to use help desk software to communicate with them
- and even if you get their personal email address it has one of those autoresponders that tell you they aren’t checking their emails anymore.
I’m not knocking those strategies, they can be very effective in automating your business and I’ve even tried some of them. What I’m saying is I’ve seen tremendous benefits from turning those things off. I tested it and I make more money without them.
By having that 2 way communication with my subscribers they trust me more and I know more of what they want. I even answer my phone, which to some marketers is gonzo nuts. However, there is no other marketing tool I own that gives me more insight into who my market is and what they want.
Ingredient #4 is know what your subscribers want
The profitability of my email list skyrockets for the 2 weeks after I survey them to see what they want. Through my
- Blog posts
- Live Internet shows
- And, picking up my phone I start to get a sense of their main interests starting to change
- Then I send them a survey to confirm and see what it is they want about that topic.
- Finally, I follow up with a campaign that delivers exactly what they’ve told me they want.
It’s so simple but sooo many marketers aren’t doing it or not doing it enough.
I hear business owners telling me they don’t like to sell, but if they just knew what their customers want they’d never have to sell to them. If you know everyone in your local mall is craving white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, then all you have to do is tell people where to get them and they’ll go buy them.
If you showed up with cranberry oatmeal cookies instead, then you’re probably going to have to pull out every sales trick in the book to get them over too you instead. I don’t know about you but I sure don’t like hanging out with someone who’s always trying out a new sales trick on me.
I do like hanging out with my friends and sharing secrets though.
Ingredient #5 is to be friendly and transparent with your subscribers
I’m not the picturesque businessman. I’ve got a bald head, a beard, a little overweight, tattoo’s, I speak my mind, and I use foul language to emphasive my emotions. When I first started out online I did everything I could to hide those things.
As I slowly started letting those things out, scared that it would hurt my reputation, more of my subscribers started to fall in love with me. They didn’t look at me like I was less then perfect. Instead they responded with “hey I’m the same way.”
Sure some people don’t like it, some people are just totally opposite of me and we don’t clique. So they go find someone else that they do clique with and the others bond too me closer then ever before. No matter what you can’t please everyone. If you try to be clean and perfect like Eben Pagan you loose the people that like the Frank Kern style.
If you are like Frank Kern you loose the type of people that love Eben Pagan. It’s easiest to just be yourself and let it all just flow out. The bond you create with your subscribers when you show them who you really are is incredible and they’ll buy more from you. Because now they’re thinking, “wow he/she’s just like me and if they can do it then so can I.”
Wrapping Up
If you’ll implement those 5 ingredients into your email marketing I guarantee you’ll see amazing results.
With those 5 ingredients you can have a small subscriber base and get the same results of guys with 50x more subscribers then you.
In fact when I launched my SEO Lies ebook in Novemeber, my #1 affiliate had 18,000 subscribers and my #2 affiliate lost by only 1 sale while only having 880 subscribers! Both got nearly the same result but one focuses more on size and the other more on quality.
Imagine what happens when you mix size with quality!
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