The Value of Consistency - Ask Me Anything - Local Business Marketing

Have you ever wondered, like, the money that you're spending for marketing or advertising, is it working? I mean, is there a return on your investment? I mean, that's, that's the whole thing. It's like, hey, if I give somebody to drive through X number of dollars, they're going to give me a bag full of some kind of food. That's return on my investment. Now, granted, that's a little different than, hey, I gave a marketing company a dollar. How much should I get back? Well, I want to share with you something today that I kind of, on a monthly basis, I kind of look at all these things, actually an ongoing basis for my clients. And something came about today that just kind of caught my attention as I was sharing it. And I'm thinking, wow, this is really, really powerful information. I knew that. But this is what I want to show you. I'm going to share with you how powerful email marketing can be and, and really how important it is when it comes to, am I getting money back? Is there an investment? And I want you to think of this as the bigger you grow your email list, the better you are at broadcasting a message every week. And I just sent a message out to one of my clients, kind of updating them. And we're going to look at his email, his live email activity here in just a second. But I wanted to point out that he has a database. Let's go ahead and bring it on screen. Yeah, thank you. Let's bring that on screen. So you can see here he has a database here. Let me just pull this down so you can see it.

They currently have 12,000, just under 12,100 names in our database. All right, and this was the last email we sent. We sent an email every Tuesday for them. And so when we look at this, we said, hey, 35.4%. Well, that's higher than their average. That's higher than the average in their industry. And what I wanted to point out was how important it is to think about, well, how many people are you getting in front of? And sometimes I think we look at the open rate as really, that's kind of the holy grail. But I want you to think of this as like the goose that laid the golden egg. You don't want to kill the goose. You want to enjoy the eggs. But how valuable is the goose? So let's take a look at this. And what I mean by this is there's 12,000. Let's just to keep it easy, 12,000 names in the database. Last week they had 4,312 people. Let's just say 4,300 people open their email. Now, I can't tell you whether they read it all. You know, we can use heat maps and find that out. But 4312 people open an email. So let's look at that. So you're thinking, well, yeah, Jeff, but there's about 8,000 in this case, about 7,700 people who didn't open the email. But here's where the magic is. In my opinion, those people who didn't open the email still what, saw this company in their inbox and they are still subscribers. In other words, they didn't say, hey, unsubscribe, this is a hassle. I want to get rid of this company. Don't send me more emails. No, no, they said, I'll still take the email because I have done service with this company. I'm very happy with them. And if there's something that comes down into my inbox with the headline that catches my attention, I'm going to open that. Now, let me show you how this fluctuates. So last week there's 4,312 people opened it. The week before, this is just a test email. There was about 3,000. So why the drop off? Well, maybe because it said, prepare, prepare your H Vac for winter blues. Maybe there's already a high number of people who have already had the service done and, and this didn't pertain to them. But 3,000, 2,000, 950 said, hey, this is important for me to open. But keep in mind, the people who didn't open it still saw it. That's the power of branding. And a lot of times I kind of compare this as if in the days when newspaper was important and we ran ads in newspaper. There was an example, I think it was David Ogilvy. Maybe somebody else said, this is, is one day a gentleman opened up his newspaper and said, oh my gosh, how perfect. There is a washing machine on sale. And our washing machine just broke down. But what was going on? Was that company running that ad. They did it every day. They had it in the newspaper every day. Why? Because we are deletion creatures. There's so many things going on around us, sometimes we choose not to take that information in. So in that 3,000 people, 9,000 people said, I'm not taking that in right now. But the other part about this is, is the following week, 1300 more people opened up that inbox because it did appeal to them. And with that in mind, I want you to think about this. So how does this relate back to me? Well, you can go online, go to Google, probably ChatGPT now, and say, hey, what's the average ROI for an email? And it's about 4300. And what I mean by that, for every $1 you invest in an email, you get about 43 to $45 back. Now, we have been doing marketing for local businesses for over 12 years as of this recording. And to get a 43 or 45 to 1 ROI.

Is almost impossible. Almost impossible. Even the day when chatbots first came out, we were like the first ones to ever do this. And we were getting, you know, 80, 90% open rates, and we were getting excited when, you know, we're getting about 50% to actually take it. That dropped off very rapidly. We couldn't get that kind of return. Email has been this way for decade, for over a decade. 43 to $45 per name that you put in for one name, you put in. In other words, you spend a dollar to get the name. It's about 43 to $45. So in this case, when we have, you know, three or 4,000 people open up that email and they, they consume a portion of it or they feel like, hey, this could be something I need. Whether it's a plumber or it's a, you know, solar company, it doesn't matter. One of our physicians. The key to this is get yourself an email list. So if you're watching and you're thinking, well, you know, I'll give an example. One of our clients, it was fairly new to us, came aboard and ask, I said, do you have an email list? They said, well, yeah, we do have a list. And I said, well, when's the last time you actually communicate with that list? They're like, well, you know, some of these names are like 7 to 10 years old. I said, hey, let's just. When's the last time you communicated with them? Well, you know, we send out a birthday card. And so in other words, they really hadn't done any communicating with them except, hey, here's a birthday card, an anniversary. That's about it. What I'm talking about here is consistently communicating with them. I'm not saying you have to do it every day. Every day can be obnoxious. But once a week is valuable. Repetition is the mother of success. This is what I want you to think about. So we went back in there, we started working that particular email list. And what happened was, I'm going to Take this down because I want to share you, I want to share with you a second one that we have.

And this is a small list. Let me get back over here on this page and I'm just going to pull up this other, this other list real quick while we're doing this. But I want to tell you when we started doing this, we kind of did it in a mindset of hey, we're not sure exactly what's going to happen. We're going to be pretty open minded about it and, and then see how it goes and then add names as we go along. And so we did that and what was happening was some pretty cool things can happen. You know, this is live. So it's sending me a code. So let's see.

Let'S see.

So we started sending emails out and we do, we call a initiation campaign. We kind of, you know, send some things out. It's 100% value driven. There's, there's no, there's no selling, no call to action. It's just making sure it's okay with these people to communicate with them. Now I want to show you this particular client.

Let me just.

Go to the same page there and pull this up because I want you, I want you to see this because I want you to realize it works on any size audience. It's not just because there's someone had 12,000, this, this particular client has about 800.

And so if you look at this, 30, 37 or 39.4, 37.6, 42.6, 46% 40, 45.3% open rate. This is incredibly strong. Imagine if for every two people or three people you spoke with three of them let you tell the story about your business. In this case, you know, when it's 46%, that means 246 people. I made a estimate. He's more like 600 people in their name, 246 people a week. This customer got to communicate with. Now in this situation, the value of that relationship. In other words, if one person raised their hand and said, hey, I'll take your, your product. Well, what that means is that could be anywhere from probably between, you know, $2,010,000 for that particular sale. Well, or that transaction. So now if, if they could get in front of 250, let's look at the 39.4. If they can get in front of 200 people a week, 210 people a week and communicate their message and maybe only one or two people will say, hey, raise your hand, I'd love for you to do take care of me on this particular project or service. That's huge. That's huge. So every week we're able to send out a message to these people from this customer that has high value.

With a call to action. And a call to action may be saying, hey, if you know someone that this may be beneficial for because these particular people are not buying these, you know, his services every week, it may be once every five years, but the thing about it is they'll have people they know that they can do business with and they'll refer them. Why? Because this particular customer is taking care of them and always providing information. Now, again, when we look at this and say, yeah, 209 people opened up, but let's say, just say it's 700, 500 people didn't. But the 500 people are still subscribed. They're still seeing this particular client in their inbox. That's branding. That's like driving down the street and seeing the same, you know, heating air conditioner or the same attorney all the time. You may not need that attorney, but you remember in the area we're in 760-777-7777. And if you're anyone who lives in Southern California, Coachella Valley, you know who that is. I don't have to explain it. You already know who it is. It's the guy. So branding, consistency, giving value, that's what I wanted to share today is just like this. I'm not asking for anything. I'm sharing something that is extremely valuable, extremely helpful. And so now there's a question. I've said, well, okay, Jeff, what if I don't have an email list? Well, I'm going to touch on that very quickly. If you don't have an email list, then think about the product or service that you offer. What is something you can give in exchange for a name and email address? Please, please, please do not say sign up for my newsletter. Don't do that. That's not really what. They don't want more in. They don't want more emails. I'll give you an example. I just, just before I started recording this, I did download a free ebook from somebody because it had valuable information I felt like I could extract it would help me. I exchange that information. So what is it? Something that value as an example, let's say, for instance, if you're a heating air conditioning company, you know, could it be download my. This free certificate that when you book a. A seasonal cleaning with us or a seasonal Checkup with us. You get the next two, let's say the next two filters for free, right? So they get the value of coming out to your home, doing a full walkthrough on your heating, air conditioning system and then before they leave, they leave two.

New filters for you that could be changed out in the future. Well, that's a value because we're going to do it anyway and we're going to have our heat and air conditioning change anyway or serviced anyway. And now we're going to get two free filters in exchange for our name and email address. There's a lot of things you can do to get a name and email address. Now I want to give you one. Don't. Please make sure that you don't offer something that has nothing to do with your industry. In other words, if I am a, let's say, let's say I am a massage therapist, I'm not. But if I were a massage therapist, I'm not now going to do a free drawing for an Apple iPad. You see, there's no connection there. There's nothing there. But what if I gave, you know, a free drawing and I drew every week for a free massage, a free 30 minute massage. Maybe it's a neck and shoulder massage. Well, let me ask you something. If everybody who went into that particular drawing versus the iPad, how many people are probably interested in getting a massage? Well, the people on the iPad, they're looking to win the iPad. But the people putting their name in there for a free drawing for the neck and shoulder massage, they are interested in massages. So make sure whatever you give away, it's appropriate for your audience. Think about, hey, is this something my audience would use? If I have a heating, air conditioning company, it's probably, and I work with residential customers. Well, you can think about all the things our ideal customer residential homeowners would say. I would exchange that for that. So the big thing today is I want to share with you is one, the value of consistency. Repetition is the mother of skill. And email, the return on investment is enormous. And don't overlook the people who are not opening your emails. It's not a bad thing. They're allowing you to come by every day, knock on your door and you look at and you say, oh, that's so and so, we don't need to have him. But you remember it's Joe's yard service, right? You didn't open the door, you didn't go out and let him in, but you looked out the window and said, oh, that's Joe's. So now if somebody says, hey, I'm looking for a new gardener, oh, you got to go to Joe's, man. He's here every week in my inbox. He's always here, right? So that's name and brand recognition. And finally, if you don't have an email list, start building one. Create what we call a lead magnet. This is something you give somebody of value.

In exchange for the name and email address. And then you have to take on that ownership of saying, hey, these are people who trust me with their name and email address. I'm not going to spam them. I'm going to send them out information that, that will be valuable to them. Now, before I sign off, I want to give you one other little piece of information.

Years ago, we took on a client, and that client sent out emails once every two weeks. Every two weeks, the same thing is exactly the same email. It was a coupon that was discounting for their services. They depended on very little or no value or, excuse me, sales from that email. They were 100% of the time. They were doing all their marketing in newspaper, but they had started to notice for newspaper dropping off. So they reached out to me and I helped them with their emails. We got rid of those coupons and we started adding emails of value.

And very shortly after that, after they felt comfortable, it was like three or four months maybe at the most, they 100% ditched their, their, their advertising for their newspaper. Because now their email marketing replaced or doubled what their newspaper ads were running, and it was a fraction of the cost. Now roll that out three years later, and their email list has more than doubled. It went from like 1800 to 3800 names in the email list. Why? Because it just kept getting more customers, more referrals, more repeats. So it can be done. So I encourage you to do that. If you need more help with that, my name is Jeff Harrison with Swing Point Media. You see it on the screen there? I'd love to help you out. And hey, have a great day.