Startup Q&A #14: Email Marketing - Why to Use It and How to Do It

Hey everybody, Matthew Paulson here. Today we are going to talk about email marketing. So we'll discuss why email is an important marketing strategy, how to grow your email list, how to make sure that your messages actually get to your users inboxes, and what kind of messages to send your email list. Let's do this. This is officially episode 14 of Startup Q and A, the online video show that helps small business owners, startup founders and entrepreneurs grow their businesses faster and achieve their dreams of financial freedom. So whether you're just getting started or if you have a hundred employees, this is the show that will give you actionable ideas and advice in your business. So we are going to do a theme show on Startup Q and A today. Obviously we are in a little bit different setting. We are in my home office and not my downtown office. My kids are sick so I am at home. So we're doing a recording at my house today. And this is the background that you get to see. I didn't stage it at all. This is just what it looks like every day. So today we're going to talk about email marketing. This is I think episode what, 15 now and nope, 14. And one thing I've noticed about the different episodes we've done is that the content between questions tends to be a little bit disjointed. So for the next few episodes at least, I'm going to try to do a theme for each show and then answer several questions around that theme. So this is kind of the first in say a two part series on email marketing. So today's questions and next week's questions will all focus around email and then we'll pick another topic from there. So if you have a topic you'd love to hear about in detail on this show, feel free to send me an email mattattpolfson.com and I'll be glad to consider that for an upcoming episode also this week, the questions that are on the show aren't. Nobody actually asked these. They're just the most common questions that people have about email marketing and they're probably the questions that people would ask anyway. So I am going to just answer the common questions that come up over and over again when I talk to people about email marketing, but they did not come from any specific person. But before we dive into the questions today, I wanted to share a tip on email deliverability that will help make sure that your messages get to your users inboxes and don't get stuck in a spam folder or get not delivered at all. So this is A segment that I call the tip of the week. So this week's tip is to test every email blast that you're going to send against mail-tester.com now, mail tester, what it does is it gives you an actual email address to send a test email to. And then mailtester will run it against a variety of different checks that email service providers will use to determine whether or not your message should get into your user's inboxes. So one thing they do is they run it against an anti spam filter called Spam Assassin, and they'll tell you all the error messages that Spam Assassin sends. So they'll say, oh, Matt, you're including a lot of make money online kind of language in your email. You probably shouldn't do that because Spam Assassin doesn't like it. So take out these words and then you can fix it. So there's that. There's a lot of other great stuff. It makes sure that your email is formatted properly, has all of the right headers and that kind of stuff. It makes sure that you have all your DNS authentication records set up. So your SPF records, which stands for Sender Policy framework, and DKIM records, which are domain keys, I identified mail or something like that. But these are records that are for your domain that says your web server has, or your email service provider has the permission to send email on behalf of your domain name. If those aren't set up, that's pretty much an instant you're going to the spam filter. So that will. Mailtester will make sure you have that set up. And it will just do a lot of different things like that to just make sure that you're doing all of the basics right with your email. So Mail Tester is a great tool. Whenever we have an email message that's going to go out in a couple days, my assistant Stevie will send the test message to mailtester from our email service provider. I get the results of that. Then if we need to make any adjustments, then we can do that before the message goes out. And that certainly has helped with our deliverability and our open rates. And at the end of the day, the revenue that we generate from the email just by making sure that everything is set up properly, our messages are formatted properly, and we're not going to set up a spam filter that can make a big difference in your deliverability. So that's the tip of the week. Let's dive into the questions. So every week we take four or five questions through Facebook, but not today, because these are questions that I made up and we answer them. But if you have a question you would like to have answered on a future episode of the show, go to the domain startupq and a co and that will redirect you to my website. And under the Startup Q and a show menu item there is a link to ask a question. I also periodically just ask on Facebook if people have questions. So if you see one of those posts on my personal page or my business page, go ahead and respond and I'll try to include that in an episode of the show as well. Alright, so the first question today is why is building an email list important? And you know, a lot of people say email is dead. I don't read email. And the people that say this tend to be the people that are younger and very tech savvy. But these views aren't representative of the world as a whole. The statistics really tell a different story. First, I think the reason to use email is that the ROI on email marketing is just massive. The Direct Marketing association did a study. They said that for every dollar that you invest in email marketing, you'll get an average of $43 back in revenue. That's, you know, for 100 bucks you get 4,300 bucks back. I don't know anybody that wouldn't want a marketing strategy with that kind of roi. I'll spend that money all day long until it stops working. Second, I think it's important to recognize how big of a platform email is. It's bigger than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and pretty much every other social network combined. There are about 2.6 billion email accounts worldwide. 72% of US consumers use email and read email on a regular basis. And 61% of people say they like to receive email from businesses. And 72% of consumers say that email is their preferred way to communicate with the companies they do business with. So just email is just a massive platform. It's bigger than any social network. It's just huge. And if you're not using it, it's like you're missing out on using two Facebooks. That's really what this is also another reason to use email. It's a federated technology, so there's no one big company that owns it. So with Facebook, maybe you bought a Facebook page and then they said, oh by the way, you need to pay us to contact the people that like your page. Nobody can change the game on email like that because it's an open standard. Google can't get in the way of you contacting your customers. Neither can Facebook or Twitter or Apple. It's a direct one to run a relationship. And no one big company can say, you change the rules of the game and say no, you can't email your audience anymore. Which is really nice. Email also turns your casual people that are on your website, your casual visitors, it turns them into fans. So the way email works, you get on somebody's mailing list, they send you content over and over and over again. So normally you might just go to their website and you forget about it. But if they send you an email every three days with great content, you become a fan of that brand, you like their stuff and all of a sudden you find yourself you're not just went to the website once, left and never came back again. You find that you're a fan of their content because they keep sending you stuff and you keep liking it. All of a sudden you find that you're buying stuff from these people and you're signing up for their other mailing list. You're on their website all the time. And the reason is because they have the ongoing communication channel of email where they're sending you stuff on a pretty regular basis. So that's pretty much it. Some people say they hate email, some people say email is dead. The stats say otherwise, the marketing results say otherwise. Email really is a great marketing channel and if you're not utilizing it, you are definitely missing out on some revenue in your business. So that's the first question. Question 2 How can I build my email list from my website? First thing is obviously you have to ask for the person's email. So the way to do this is to put a prominent opt in form on your website. So this could be kind of your homepage. There's a big place to put in your email for or email address. You could have a pop up opt in form like we do on MarketBeat and USGFTV. You can have an opt in form below the post on each page, below the main body of your article. You could have an opt in form there. You can have an opt in form in the sidebar. You could do kind of a bar that runs across the bottom here, something up top that runs across the top or something in the corner. There's lots of different places that you can put these things. What we do at MarketBeat is we have a pop up opt in form that shows people once and then it doesn't bother them for a while. Then typically below the content of a post we'll have another opt in form and then in the sidebar we'll throw a third opt in form and that's worked out pretty well for us. So there are plenty of different opt in form plugins that will help you do this. OptinMonster, Optin Cat Sumome, hello Bar, Optin Revolution, Popup Domination. These are some of the common plugins that people use. These plugins will hook up your website. They'll put the pop up in place, they'll connect with your email service provider, whether that's Mailchimp or AWeber or who knows who that would be. But that plugin will connect your esp. They'll make the form for you. You just have to fill in what your copy is going to be and they'll do all the technical work, connect your email service provider and actually show the pop up. And that will make it just really easy to collect emails on your websites. So your opt in form, you really have to have a reason for somebody to give you their email address. If it just says, hey, sign up for my mailing list, you're not going to get a whole lot of opt ins. So you really have to give people something in exchange for their email address. Give them some kind of free report, a software download, maybe a newsletter, who knows what. But you have to give them something that they perceive as valuable in exchange for their email address so that they're willing to give their email up to you. People see their email as having, they know that it's a valuable commodity to you as a marketer, so they're going to want something in exchange for that to hand over their email address. At MarketBeat, what we do is we do our newsletter sign up and people like our newsletter. So that is a valuable enough of a lead magnet to get people in the door. U.S. golf TV, we do a, we always do a video series and then they rotate every day. So if somebody signs up for somebody lands on US Golf tv, there's a pop up that says, hey, do you want to improve your drives? You know, hit your ball further down the course and then there's a free video series that they can get for giving us their email address. That strategy alone on a website that doesn't get all that much traffic has taken us from 3,000 email opt ins to 88,000 email opt ins in about two and a half years. So just doing the basics right can really make a difference in the size of your email list. A couple other important caveats. Make sure that your lead magnet, your offer is relevant to the content on the page. So if you'll write about five or six different kind of topic areas, maybe you could have five or six different, six different lead magnets. So that way if you're talking about golf on one page and basketball on another page, the golf page has a golf opt in form and the basketball page has a basketball opt in form. It's very important to make sure that the stuff on your page, the opt in forms, are relevant to the content. Because if people are coming to learn about golf, you know they want to see something about golf, they don't care about basketball when they're doing it. Searching. Finally, make sure to keep your opt in form simple. Every opt in form I do, I only collect the person's email address. I don't even bother collecting their name or any other piece of information. For every additional form field that you add to your website, you'll collect on average about 30% fewer opt ins. So if you were going to collect 100 opt ins with one form, you might collect 70 with two fields and then maybe 45 or 50 with three and it just goes down from there. So keep it really simple. If you need to collect other information, give people a link in your welcome email to fill out a profile. But definitely keep it as simple as possible and you can just go back and collect any other information that you want, like gender or interest. You can always do that later on using the technology from your email service provider. That's pretty much it on your website. Have a good opt in form, make it hard to miss, have an offer that's relevant to people, keep it simple and just have good copy. Use one of the standard plugins and that's really all there is to it. If you have the basics set up right, you get a decent opt in rate and then from there it's just a matter of driving traffic to your website so that those people end up signing up for your email list. So question three, next question is what are some other ways that I can build my email list? So some people think that the only way to build opt ins to your mailing list is to have an opt in form on your website. But there are actually a ton of different ways through paid advertising and just other strategies that you can use to grow your email list. So the first is co registration advertising, effectively advertising on other people's thank you page, thank you pages from their sign up forms. So like if you go on to street.com, you sign up for one of their things, sometimes you'll see an offer from MarketBeat. If you check the box and then you click the button on there, that person, then you'll end up subscribing for MarketBeat as well. And that's a strategy that's worked out really well for us. We pay 2 to $3 per email address and then it ends up being worth $7,8 to us over the course of time. So it's definitely worth checking out if it's in your industry. We probably spent over half a million dollars on Codreg in the last three or four years and it has definitely been a strategy that's doing well for us. It only works in some industries. Finance, there's a ton of coedge going on. A few other spaces. Sports, Internet marketing, survival. So just be aware that you might not be able to do it if you're in an esoteric industry. But a lot of the popular ones like health, there's definitely coverage out there. Email swap. So if you know somebody else as a mailing list, you can write an email to send to their list to promote your stuff and they'll send whoever you're swapping the email with, they'll write an email to send you a list you swap and then you can both benefit from each other's audiences. That's a great strategy that works. You can rent other people's email lists. So you give them a message and then you pay them. If somebody else has a mailing list, you pay them to send your message to their mailing list. That works. You probably have to work through an agency to find people that have lists to buy, but it's definitely out there. People pay to rent a MarketBeat list. It's pretty good money. So if you're looking for another way to spend money to buy emails, that's a way to do it. You do need to have a good landing page and a good offer though to make the math work out. But it's definitely doable. Put an opt in for on linking your email signature. So whenever you email somebody from your personal email, have a link at the bottom. That gives them an opportunity to sign up for your stuff. That's an easy thing to do. You can do paid advertising on Facebook and Twitter through Lead cards. So those are like one click buttons where Facebook and Twitter will hand over the user's email address to you through an API. That's really nice way to get affordable opt ins through these social networks. So I mean really it's just any kind of Facebook ad you would see. But then there might be a button that says sign up. But instead of them going to a signup form, it'll just pass their email address on to you or it'll pre fill out a form which works really well. Next, make your email shareable. So put a button inside your emails that will allow your recipients to share the content of that email with a friend. Most ESPs will do this for you. That's kind of a nice way to make your content a little bit more viral. And then when you're sending out content to your list, make sure you also put that content on your website. It'll give you a nice kind of long tail SEO benefit where people might find your email content on your website when they wouldn't have otherwise found it. So it's effectively if you reuse your email content on your website, you're putting more pages for Google to find index and that'll hopefully cause you to rank for more keywords. Get more people on your website and then if you have your opt in form set up, you'll get more email signups there. Question 4 what kind of email should I send to my email list? So there are two broad categories of messages that you're going to be sending your audience over time. The first is autoresponders and these are the messages that everybody is going to get when they first sign up for your mailing list. So if you go to MarketBeat.com and you sign up, you'll get about an email every about three days for the first 90 days of your subscription. So there's a total of about 30 emails in this chain. And regardless of when you sign up, you will get these for 30 emails in the first 90 days of your subscription. The purpose of these emails is to provide a consistent set of content to everybody that signs up for your mailing list. So these emails will inform people about our products and services that we have. We'll tell them about free tools and resources under our website, we'll send them educational content, we'll try to sell them a few things. That way everybody that's on your mailing list will learn kind of the basics about your company, what they need to know in kind of that first 90 day period. I do think every three days is about right. It's not too aggressive and annoying, but it's also not too little where people just will never learn about you because you don't email them. So I like to do every three days for about the first couple months. And after three months maybe you keep it going, maybe you don't. Just you really have to check and See whether or not people continue to be engaged at that point. The other type of email that you send to people are email blasts. And these are messages that go to your entire mailing list, regardless of when they subscribed. There's lots of different reasons you would send an email blast. If you have a new piece of content, you might want to send that out to your entire mailing list. You might have a newsletter that you send out every week or every month, certainly do that as well. You might have a new product you're launching, you want to do a campaign for that product. So you might want to send out 3, 4, 5, email blast, about one product over a couple weeks. You might want to have somebody else's product you want to promote. But definitely, there's definitely a balance between stuff that's just pure content and educational and trying to sell them stuff. We send out a free newsletter every day. That's kind of the free value content. And then we certainly don't try to sell people. We certainly send out far fewer emails than that to try to sell people stuff. So for every one email with just pure content, helpful stuff, you should have a balance of at least one to one of helpful stuff and stuff where you're trying to sell people. So there's kind of always the question of when should people start receiving email blasts? Typically, you don't want to send people two emails on one day. So if somebody is scheduled to receive an autoresponder message that day, they probably shouldn't get your email blast. What a lot of people do is they just wait until people are done with your autoresponder series to start sending them email blasts. That works. And what we do is if somebody is going to get an autoresponder that day, they just don't get the email blast from us, which is certainly fine because we always want them to get the autoresponder messages before they get the email blasts from us. So lots of different reasons to send email blasts, but you definitely want to do it at least once a week. Otherwise people will forget that they're on your email list and then they'll get upset and unsubscribe when you do finally email them a couple months down the line. If you stop emailing people, they just kind of forget that they signed up for your list. And when you email them, they think you're a spammer because they don't remember opting in. So definitely consistently send content to people, whatever that is. So maybe have like a Saturday newsletter or something like that where people are always getting something from you every week and that way they don't forget. They sign up for your mailing list and continue to be engaged with your content. So there's the Autoresponder series. Everybody gets that for the first three months and then they move over to Email Blast. And then those are the one off messages that you send to people to either share new content or try to sell something or promote somebody else's product. Definitely those are kind of the messages that you'll send your audience. So those are the questions today. Of course I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my book about email marketing called Email Marketing Demystified. I think I can grab a copy over here of the bookshelf. That's this book and Email Marketing Demystified is kind of a comprehensive guide to implementing email marketing in your business. So it really goes over Whoops. This is the going off script for a moment, but this is the magical pink copy of automatic income that CreateSpace misprinted. There's like five copies of these in the world, so if you have one of them, maybe it'll be valuable someday, but probably not. Alright, back to Email Marketing Demystified. It is the I guess if you're listening to this on audio, that probably made no sense but a book fell off my bookshelf. I picked it up and it was the pink copy of my book. So Email Marketing Demystified. It is a comprehensive guide to implementing email marketing in your business. It goes over all the stuff we talked about in the show today in detail. It's $3 for the ebook on Amazon, so I'm definitely not getting rich off of it. But if you want to know how to build your email list, choose an email service provider. Make sure that your messages actually get in your subscribers inboxes. All the good stuff that is related to email marketing. Go check out this book. It was definitely a passion project of mine. I didn't make a lot of money off of it, but the content is really good so I hope you'll enjoy it. If you don't want to pay for it, send me an email. I'll send you a PDF copy. I don't need your $3. So that's the book. So those are the questions this week. Lost my place. This is definitely going to be one of the more off script shows. Alright, so if you would like to subscribe to Monday's episode of Startup Q and A, go to the domain startupqa Co and next Monday's show can be delivered to you automatically through any number of ways whether that be email, Facebook, RSS, iTunes, YouTube or Stitcher. We really try to be everywhere at the show so that you can consume it however you want to consume it. You can also follow me personally on facebook@facebook.com matthewpulseonpage and on Twitter my user ID is MatthewDP D as in dog, P as in pony so if you enjoyed the show, go onto itunes, take a few minutes, leave a review that will help us out and that will help us spread the message of financial freedom through the power of entrepreneurship to more people and just help us get this message to the world. Hopefully help more people start successful businesses that make money and allow them to quit their day jobs and build wealth and all that good stuff that comes with it. Alright, that's the show. I'm going to cut it off here. Clearly I am still getting over a cold and had too much Red Bull today. So that is the show. I will see you next Monday.