A short YouTube talk (transcript) by Mark Simpson arguing that email marketing—when done as storytelling and regular communication rather than hard selling—is highly effective for small businesses. He recommends weekly personal-style emails to stay top-of-mind and contrasts this low-cost approach with large-scale brand advertising (TV, radio, billboards, paid ads).
Chapters
Your post could get lost within hundreds of other Facebook business pages that are trying to get your attention. Now, the beauty of an email is that when an email comes into the inbox, when they click and open up your email, then its focus is just on you. The reason why so many people don't do email marketing is because they associate it with sleazy or scummy. Or they just think about the emails that are in their inbox right now and probably 90% of them just look sleazy, salesy, scummy. The trick is here is to do what everybody else isn't and base your email and try and give them a story. Don't try and sell, but be communicative. It's easy for me to say, try and write your emails like you're writing to a Lonlock's pen pal. And again, at times like these, if you can send an email to somebody, whether it's a, a past guest or somebody that has signed up to your email list and hasn't yet booked, and if you can do it once a week, and this is my thing with emails is once a week, then again you're going to be top of mind for when people are ready to book. It's why these big, big, big brands that they do the radio ads, they spend so much money on TV ads, they spend so much money on Google Ads and social media ads and billboards. It's because when you walk into a shop and you've got all of these options in front of them, they are banking on all of the advertising that they've done for when you walk into the shop and they see their brand name or when you see their brand name, they're going to go, ah, so it's brand recognition. And again, we don't have to go to the levels of spending thousands on TV ads and radio ads and billboard ads and Facebook ads. All we need to really be focusing on is emails and social media. I pretty much guarantee you you'll be ahead of about 89 to 90% of everybody else out there.