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Email Marketing Obliterates your BS excuses
As many of you know, we've been promoting email marketing for years, encouraging you to have a newsletter for your customers that is much like this one. Not to be overly arrogant about it, but, we always knew we were right. This year has seen some developments that make the case even stronger. The common objections to such a marketing effort have been thoroughly proved wrong.
If a regularly published e-newsletter and email product sales messages are not part of your marketing efforts this year, you are making a serious and foolish mistake. |
If you aren't using the simplest and most cost effective marketing ever invented, it is probable you have justified it to yourself by using one of the: (insert do do doo sound here)
"Top Five BS excuses for not Email Marketing"
1. I hate Junk Mail, so why would I send it to my customers?
Credit for the best answer to this BS excuse goes to my buddy and favorite Penguin, Michael Katz. He points out that while it is true all the garbage can impact the efficacy of email marketing, all that crap clogging inboxes actually improves your ability to stand out. Send worthwhile, readable messages regularly and your readers will love it. Even if only half of your readers open it, that's many (5? 10? 50?) times better than the percentage of people who read your newspaper ads or accept your unsolicited phone calls.
2. What would I have to say?
No matter what your business is, there's a tremendous amount of information you think of as "common" that you explain to customers all the time. How many sizes does that come in and why? What are the options and why should I choose them? What's new? The best bet here is to think of your newsletter like lunch - if you took an important customer to lunch and they asked the super common question "How are things in your industry?" what would you say? The other thing is to keep a topic list - write down ideas as they pop into your head and you'll quickly discover the topics far outnumber publishing opportunities. For many of you, your wholesalers provide more information than you could ever publish to your own customers.
3. It's too hard and technical
This newsletter is published through the Constant Contact system, one of literally hundreds of email service bureaus. These companies will take care of all of the details for you and they do it so well that companies like KISS, who have the in-house expertise (to say the least), still outsource publishing for the cheap $30 a month it costs. Besides liking this service bureau, we use this particular one because they hired us to develop design templates for them (one of many super easy snazzy features you could use). When we visited the firm to go over the design project, there was a big paper "10,000" on the wall - the number of paying customers they had in 2004. Today they have over 50,000 customers. These service bureaus make it possible for anyone to send stunningly good looking email campaigns, track the results and manage subscribers. Installing a new light in your dining room might seem an impossible task if you didn't know there was such a thing as an electrician.
4. My product/service is too complicated
It's not hard to see why you might think that, but you are completely wrong. The exact opposite is true - the more complicated whatever you sell is, the more effective email marketing will be. The business networking organization BNI calls this concept the trust/confidence curve. Example - if you are considering a new florist, you'd be pretty likely to try out that curve. It's not a big deal, really, to test $25 worth of flowers - a low risk way to see if they have good service and a nice product - and if they do, you'll give them your business. Choosing an accountant is much more complicated, since if that person makes a serious mistake you can go to jail. The more complicated the business the more trust/confidence a prospective customer will require before they buy. If you have a complicated product or service, you try to build relationships and you have long lead times - something email marketing is stunningly good at. It is a zero risk way for a prospect to "get to know" you. Here at KISS we have had people read our newsletter for as long as 18 months before asking for a proposal on web site work. We never call them, we never bother them - we just send them this nice little newsletter every two weeks.
5. We can't do things on a schedule, we're too busy
I have a confession to make - this newsletter is written weeks in advance, and occasionally longer for news items that are not time sensitive. Remember that handy dandy email service bureau? You can write issues anytime and schedule them to be sent literally months in advance. Let's say you want to send something monthly, and you figure it takes an hour or two to get it all done. That's a dozen hours of marketing time to achieve the goal for this year - and that means you could finish all of the work for the year in three afternoons. A very nice way to cross the item off your to do list until next spring.
Bottom line here - email marketing is cheap, simple, and incredibly effective. You are out of excuses and should be sending something to your prospects and customers on a regular schedule. It's easy and you can devote as much or as little time to it as you'd like. I'll bet once you see the results you'll agree it's the most effective marketing technique ever invented. |
