5 Min Marketing Friday - Is Email Marketing Dead | Content Marketing

If you're a local business, is it still a good idea to collect email addresses or is email dead? Well, on today's episode, we're going to talk about that and you might be surprised at what we discover.

Hey, welcome back. I'm Jeff Harrison with swingput Media. And yeah, that's a question that comes up often enough. Well, should I even have a database? Why is it important? Is it more important that I'm on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok? Isn't that the real place where I should be building my subscriber list? I'd have to say absolutely not. And the reason is, is because all of those other platforms, besides the one that you can own, is rented land. An example is if you have, let's say you have 5,000 followers on a social media platform and then that platform changes its algorithm or it actually goes out of business. Yes, they still go out of business, gang. Then guess what happens to your D. It's gone. The reason we say own your database is because then if something else happens outside of your business, you are still in control of that. Now, I want to start out by telling a little bit of a story about a client that I started working with a few years ago. And we first started working with them. They did most of their things in the newspaper. In fact, they ran an ad for about five or six years consistently once a month. And that's how they drove their business. They did some of the things, but most of it was in the newspaper.

But over that time, they had developed a pretty nice email database that they had gotten from customers that came aboard. They were never putting out some kind of a lead capture thing out on the Internet or anything like that or on their website. It was purely. These were people who had done business with them before. So we looked at this and said, well, let me see what you're doing now. What is it that you're doing now? And they said, well, we send out a coupon every other week. And that's all. All they did. They sent out a coupon. It was literally the same coupon they sent out every other week. No difference. Now, probably for their industry, they were probably above average for the open rates. They probably had in the neighborhood, about 22 to 25% open rate, which, that's pretty darn good. But here's what happened is we went in and said, wow, here's an audience that know, loves and trusts you. What if we took a different approach? And this is where I want you to start writing down some ideas. I want you to start taking some notes because here's what we did. The first thing we attacked is the subject line. You see, the subject line is the first thing you and I see when we open up our email carrier. So it's Gmail or Outlook, whoever it is, we see that subject line. So if that subject line is not something that we call a grabber headline, in other words, it doesn't grab my attention, then nine times out of ten will probably say, hey, I'll look at this later. And guess what? Later never comes. Now, admittedly not proudly, but I probably have about 20,000 of those. I'll look at it later in my own email, in my own email list of things that I said, well, I'll just get to later. And I never do. Why as we're talking about this, it's because their headlines didn't grab me enough to stop and say, I better open this up and see what it is. So if you think about this, when you put something out there in the email and this is true across anything, I don't care if you're running Facebook ads, social media posts, whatever it is, if it's not something that will make you stop and lean in, then I would recommend you take a little more time and put some effort into rewriting that subject line until it is something that stops you. Because let's face it, if you're on a social media platform, we're scrolling. You know, we've got thumb calisthenics going on and if we're in our email database, we're saying, hey, when we come in here, we look and check our email and you know, some of us can get, you know, 100, 200, 300 emails a day and we're real quickly scanning this for the highest priority ones. If your email shows up on my inbox and it has a grabber headline, the chances are I'm going to open it. So that was the first thing we did is we started putting together grabber headlines instead of this is your coupon. That was it, this is your coupon. And over time, what we started seeing is we started seeing the open rates go up. Now, we did this in concert with a couple of other steps. The first thing we did is, and this was probably the toughest thing for my client to wrap their head around and really give us the okay on because they felt so uncomfortable. As I said, let's start putting out emails that help your audience in their day to day. What are things they're challenged with? What are things that they need to know? That sometimes have nothing to do with your service or your business. And he said, well, how is that going to help me get more customers? And I said, this is a little bit of brand building. You're building some more trust and quite frankly, you're staying top of mind. And that's probably one of the most important things about email marketing is it's top of mind. You see, even if it's one of those things where you put a grabber headline in there and it doesn't grab me enough to open it, I notice it enough, and then your business, your name, stays top of mind. A perfect example was yesterday or, excuse me, this morning I got an email from somebody and it was very early. I got busy, but I remembered it and I went back and answered it before we started filming this video today because of that. Well, so we went in and we started writing content that had more of a here's something we've discovered and we wanted to share it with you type of program. And what we saw over time is we saw their email open rates slowly go up. Now here's the other cool thing. Every month we saw new customers come aboard because the customers that were already there and doing business, guess what we did? We gave them a story to tell to their friends, their relatives, their acquaintances over coffee. In other words, if we put out a recipe on how to do a certain thing and they're having lunch with somebody and they start talking about recipes and guess what, it triggers something in their mind. And they tell the story about this recipe we gave and they say, well, where do you get that? And guess what? It's from XYZ company. So we saw their database grow and so far it's grown by about 800 more names. So they're just under 3,000 names in there. Now watch what happens. You do the math. If they open up, let's say 25%, a fourth of 2,000 names, that's 500 people would open up their emails, right? Well, they would see that coupon and the click rate was really low is, you know, maybe, maybe 1%. And they get some calls. You know, they said they would get about, about three to nine calls every other week for these. And hey, that's not bad. That's not bad. Those would be sales. But what we saw was we increased the number of people in their database by over 800. So now they're just under 3,000 instead of 2,000. And this is the other thing that's happen, open rates. Now get this, their open rates in the last four Campaigns that we've done with them have been in the 55 to 59% range. So imagine now instead of seeing 500 people opening their emails, now it's closer to 1500. So we've tripled their voice. Now I'm going to share with you on screen an email I just recently got from them. This was the last week we sent this campaign out. And we sent it out. And this is what he sent back. He said they got 19 bookings in one day. 19 bookings in one day for this company. Their average sale is about 300 to $350. So do the math. Was that email worth it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And here's the other thing. This is another takeaway is in our email system. We send out all the emails and then three days later we say, hey, send the same email out to those did not open up the email because maybe they're away on vacation, they just hadn't checked their email and they're off and running. So I suspect when it's all said and done that we'll probably see someone in the neighborhood of about 25 to maybe as many as 30 bookings for this company from the email. So let me go back to the first thing is email marketing for local businesses. Is it kind of dead passe do something different? Absolutely not. But you can't do it the way it used to to be back in the early 90s or even early 2000s because we're not that excited about getting an email anymore. The novel is worn off. You have to give us a reason. Grab her headline, make sure that subject line is there. Provide content that makes that helps me improve my life and gives me a story to tell my friends and family. Whenever I'm having coffee or I'm meeting with them and the subject comes up. That reminds me, I should tell the story about you.

So I would recommend working on building that database because it is gold. I've seen some companies actually increase their sales value. That's right, what their company sold for based on their digital footprint. And that meant, hey, how many people are in your database? I don't care how many people are following on Instagram or Facebook. I want to know how many things are you own. See, that database is an asset. That's something you own. You don't have to ask anyone permission to send out an email. Hey, I hope this has made sense for you today and I encourage you to start collecting emails and then send out an email on a pretty frequent basis. Trust me, once a week is not too much. If it is circled with value and I promise you that you'll start seeing more activity. The following ringing people coming by your your location. If you're brick and mortar and they wanted to know more about your service and they start referring people that you've never heard of, that's the best type of business you can have. And if you're like this other business that has about 3,000 names, we do it twice a month. That's about 3,000. That's leveraging about 3,000 times because they don't have a brick and mortar. Everything is serviced. They go out and do it out in the open so they don't have someplace they walk into. It makes a huge difference. Hey, until next time, my name is Jeff Harrison. If you have any questions about this or you're saying, hey, where do I get started? My information is on the screen, please give me a call or just give me an email at jeffwingpointmedia.