The do's and don'ts of using email marketing to generate new business

Hey everyone, and welcome to episode 55 of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. I hope you are having a fantastic week. This week I want to revisit a topic that I spoke about right back at the beginning of last year, and that is email marketing. And this is a topic that I think is more important than ever in this kind of disconnected world that we live in at the moment. And so if you want a robust business development strategy that delivers a continued source of ideal leads, then email marketing should be at the top of your agenda. So that's what we're talking about today. And let's get on with the episode. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Doster. Now, I've talked about the importance of email marketing and using email automation way back in episode five of the Agency Accelerator Podcast, but it's such an important topic that I wanted to address it again today in this episode. So, first of all, I want to remind everybody why it's so important. And I also want to talk about some of the do's and don'ts of email marketing. And these are some of the questions that my private clients and my group coaching program members ask me. So. So I know they're going to be relevant to you too. So in 2021, building a consistent pipeline of ideal leads is crucial, especially since we have been living in this kind of strange, disconnected world where word of mouth and referrals are drying up because we're not meeting people face to face and having those informal conversations over a coffee at a networking event. So we need a more robust business development strategy that we're in control of. And right at the top of your agenda for that should be email marketing. Now, despite what many people have said over time, email marketing is far from dead. In fact, think about it. What's the first thing you do and most other people do every morning when they get up? They look at their phone and they check their emails. Now, there's lots of stats that you can research on the Internet that tell you about why email marketing is so important. And why really is by far the most cost effective marketing strategy, both in terms of cost and in terms of time. One of the stats that I use quite a lot is that when you've got a quality list, every member of that list, every email address you have, is worth £1 to you per month. So if you've got 100 names in your list, you've got £100 of reoccurring revenue a month. If You've got a thousand, that's £1,000. 10,000. That's £10,000. So we all should really be thinking about not only building our list, but then also nurturing it so that we can convert those warm leads into fans and then get them to raise their hand and reach out to you when they are ready to buy. And like I say, that is really the most cost effective way of marketing and it gives you a way to reach out to your audience in a regular basis to keep nurturing them so that they'll buy from you when they are ready. Now, one thing that I really want to reiterate is the importance of building your social media profiles, but also working really hard to move those people from your social media network into your email list. And of course you want to do both of these things, but let me just explain why. Now I always tell the story about someone who had 10,000 followers on Instagram and they got all their business through that mechanism and then their account got hacked. And the terms and conditions of Instagram means that they reserve the right to close your account down if you get hacked. So this person tried to log in, couldn't log in, reached out to Instagram and they said, yep, you've been hacked, so you need to recreate your account. And overnight this person lost 10,000 followers and their main business development platform. And I've been given an even better example than that, and without being political in any way. Donald Trump had nearly 90 million followers on Twitter and then had his account closed down. And if he'd have been smart enough to work to build those people into an email list, then he would still have control of those 90 million followers. So the key message there is that your social media platforms are kind of like borrowed or rented space and you don't own them. But when you get those people into your email list, you have more control over communicating with them. And you are also to be able to build one to one relationships. Whereas in social media you're kind of competing for everybody's attention, so it's more like many to one. So that's a lot of reasons to to move your followers from social media to email. But of course you should do both. You want to be touching your audience through multiple mechanisms, but email should definitely be one of the things that you are focused on. So I thought I would split the rest of this podcast episode into eight do's and eight don'ts of email marketing. So let's jump into that. So my first must do thing is that when you have People who have joined your list, you want to make sure that you are emailing them regularly so that you stay front of mind with them. I always say that humans are a bit like a sand timer. And if you haven't communicated with your ideal target customer before their sand timer runs out, then they've forgotten about you and they buy from somebody else. So you want to keep that sand timer filled. And one of the ways you're going to do that is by emailing regularly. And by regularly I mean probably maximum twice a week, but minimum probably once every two weeks. So I email once a week at the moment and that works pretty well. Though I'm thinking about moving that to twice a week, but definitely not less than twice a month. So that's number one. Oh, and if someone has signed up to your list from your website, then you want to email them a welcome email immediately so that they can connect the fact they've signed up to the email they've received and not receive that email a day later or even two hours later. So the second point is it's really important to learn about your ideal target customer. And of course, this is a bigger conversation because it's important for your business to do that, but it's in from an email perspective. You need to understand what keeps them awake at night, what their pains are, what the gains they're looking for, and what that transformation is, because that gives you loads of ideas for content creation for your emails. And at the end of the day, you want to be writing content that's going to resonate with your audience and not just stuff about you. It's why I'm not really a fan of email newsletters anymore, because they tend to be about what's going on for you and not specific enough to your ideal target customer. So my second do is learn about your ideal target customer, and that will give you loads of content ideas for your emails. The third do is to make sure that you get the balance right of sending 80% value in the content in your emails and 20% selling. I've spoken about this many times before, but this balance is really important. Obviously, you want to make sure that you're providing lots of value so that people will actually want to read your emails. But if all you do is provide value, then people will just see you as a fantastic resource, but never see you as a place to buy from. On the other hand, if all you did was sell to people, then people are going to quickly unsubscribe. So you want to get that balance right. Of spending 80% of your time providing value and 20% selling. The fourth do is to really think about your subject line. This is the first thing that the subscriber will see when you send them an email, is that subject line. And that is the moment a successful campaign is either made or broken. A subject line that attracts the reader's interest will lead them to open the email and continue reading whatever it is you have to say. So think about it thoroughly before you choose your subject line. You need to make it short and enticing without being misleading. And you also need to bear in mind how much of the subject line will actually be seen on a mobile device, which is where a large percentage of your readers will actually view it. Number five is to use personalization. So Dear Rob, and you can use personalization in the subject. You can use it obviously at the start of the email, you can use it in the body of the email, but that's going to get a lot more engagement from people than if you put something generic in there. And that ties in with the sixth point, really, which is that you should be using email automation tools to manage GDPR and all that kind of stuff that I'm sure you'll be thinking about, but also to manage that personalization. So you build your list inside of your email automation system, such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, MailerLite, and so on. And you can then create the personalization, but it will also handle GDPR compliance. You can also make sure you've got permission from people to send emails and to send additional content. So that's very important, which is using an email automation system. Number seven is to make sure that you have clear calls to action in your email. So that call to action obviously is context based on whatever the content of the email is, but it might be, you know, download this ebook, book a call with me, join my Facebook group, but whatever. What's the next action you want someone to take? I appreciate not every email is going to have that, but you're probably going to want to make sure that you direct people where they can get more content on the subject of the email. So you might have an ebook that drills into much more detail. You might have a free lesson, podcast episode or whatever, but you can direct people on what you want them to do next. And then my last number eight do is to make sure you, if you, especially if you're using email automation that you use reporting to improve your future email campaigns and your future engagements, you need to be looking at the analytics of who's opened your emails, who's, who's clicked through, who's unsubscribed and so on. And just try to work out the trends of what type of content and subject works and what doesn't. And a lot of email automation systems will let you do some A B testing as well, where you can send two different versions of the email, work out which one's the winner, and then send the bulk of your emails to to that using that particular subject or that email itself. So those are my eight do's. Now let me give you eight don'ts of email marketing. So the first don't is don't buy an email list, but grow it organically through signups and through people that you have met. And I just don't think that kind of cold outreach. So that's my second point really, which is don't do cold email campaigns. And that ties in the first point. So if you buy a, then you start emailing them, the engagement you're going to get is going to be terrible. Whereas if you have built a list through people who've signed up for your website or people that you met and gave you permission to add you to your list, then you're going to get engagement of somewhere between sort of 20 to 35% open rates and up to 5% click throughs. If you do cold outreach, you're going to get open rates of less than 5% and it's going to feel like an activity that doesn't work for you. So even though you can buy email lists, I don't recommend recommend it and I also don't recommend you sending cold outreach to people. And that kind of ties in with the third point as well, which is don't spam people. Remember, you want to be using email marketing to build, know, like and trust with you, to build your authority with your audience, to build respect from your audience so that they think, ah yeah, Rob's someone that I want to listen to, I want to learn from and maybe I'll buy from him one day. And if you just spam people with generic content that's not relevant to them, then there's no way you're going to be building any no like and trust. You're going to be building don't know, dislike and distrust, which is certainly what you don't want to be doing. So don't spam people with loads of content that's not relevant to them. The fourth point, don't sell, sell, sell. So I talked earlier in the do's about getting the 8020 of value versus selling, right? And that's super important because if all you do is send out an occasional email saying, would you like to buy this from me? Then people are just not going to buy and it won't work. And then you'll be thinking, yeah, email doesn't work for me. Number five is don't use overly designed email templates and put loads of images into your email because that will just make delivery of your emails way less successful. In fact, I'm a big fan of having one topic in your email and using text based emails because I think they get much better open rates and people are much more likely to read them than if it's a sort of a mini newsletter with loads of different topics in it. So that's number five. Don't use overly designed templates and don't put too many or any images in your emails. Number six on a similar vein is don't put too many links into your emails because if your email is full of links, then your email won't get through people's spam filters and therefore you'll be going straight into their junk mail and you won't even get read even if you've got really great content because you focused on those other eight dos. So you can put links into your emails and I do in every single email I send. But just be careful of not putting too many. Number seven is a good sort of trick that I use all the time, which is if someone has downloaded something from your website like an ebook, then don't deliver that ebook via website, I. E. They put their email address in, then it appears on the next page of the website, but actually deliver it through an email. So what would happen is someone would type in their details to your website, that would filter through to your email automation system which would trigger an email going, hey Rob, thanks so much for downloading your ebook. Please find it attached Now. The reason to do that is because that will ensure that people give you valid email addresses because obviously they can't get the ebook if they don't, if they give you the wrong email address. Whereas when you can get it off someone's website and you know that, then you can just put any old email address in and you'll get the PDF or the ebook still. But the email address will just go straight into being blacklisted. So my website will say, enter your best email address and I will send the ebook right over via email. And that way I get people to give me valid email addresses. So that's Number seven, don't deliver the ebook via website. And my last don't is don't bombard your list with the same emails. But as your list grows, segment it based on their interests and where they are in the buying cycle so that you can be a bit smarter than just sending your whole list the same email every week. So a good example for me would be the fact that I try to segment my audience based on how many staff they are or whether they're just a freelancer. Because if I was sending an email about building your team, well, I really wouldn't want to send that to freelancers who have no intention of ever building a team. So I learn a little bit more about my audience when they subscribe, and that way I can segment them. And of course, I can also segment them based on a number of other things. And this is the beauty of using email automation. So I can segment if they've clicked on a link on my website, or I can segment it based on whether they opened an email or didn't open an email, and so on and so on. So number eight of my don'ts is don't bombard your list with the same email. Don't treat everybody the same. But over time, start to segment your list into various categories that you can send content that's relevant to that category. Okay, so that's my eight do's and don'ts. Wherever you are with your email list, you want to start building it today and you want to set yourself some targets to grow your list. So if you've got 10 people today, then have a target of growing it to 50 people by the end of the month. And also work hard to move your connections from LinkedIn or from Twitter or whether into your email list. And one of the ways you can do that is by saying to people that, I've got this thing that will be really valuable to you. If you'd like a copy of it, click here. And then that takes them to a page where they put their email address in and you send it over to them via email, as we've just discussed. So focus on moving your list from social media and just focus on growth. You might be thinking, well, Rob, it's fine if you've got a big list, but I don't have a list at all. But we all have to start somewhere. And honestly, if I could go back and give myself some advice, maybe seven or eight years ago, I would have said, rob, start your list now. Because I only really started focusing on growing my list about five years ago and I wish I put a lot more effort into it 10 years ago and I'd have a list that's 10 times the size. My business all predominantly comes through my list, so that is true for yours as well because you have control of on how you nurture it. Okay, so I'm going to get off my soapbox now. I hope that you are convinced about building your email list and I hope that these eight do's and don'ts have given you some sort of guidance on how you can start growing your list. Now in the show notes I'm going to put a couple of links to some useful documents that will really help you with this. One of them is around email automation and making that work for you and the other one is around five strategies to grow your email list. So have have a look at both of and that will give you a good kind of kickstart to building your list if you haven't already started it. Okay guys, I hope you found today's episode useful. It feels like it was a pretty practical episode and I hope you are a believer in building your list and you can get started on it now. As ever, please make sure you've hit the subscribe button. Please make sure you share this episode and the podcast with your colleagues, and please consider leaving a review on Apple since that really helps me be found. But have a brilliant rest of the week, a great weekend, and I'll be back with you next week for the next episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast where we'll have our latest guest.