Many businesses forget this marketing tool in their arsenal: Emails.
Sure it’s old and ancient to many people…
But those who are properly using it are getting better returns than almost all other forms of marketing.
So in this video series I’ll be going through tutorials about email marketing which include:
- Why use email?
- The best email marketing software services out there
- How to build your email list
Check out the video below to learn more about these subjects in part 1 of our “Email Marketing Profits” series.
Video Transcript
Let’s get into it.
So why email?
Now, a lot of people will. Right now, the hot thing is about let’s grow a Facebook group, right? Like grow a Facebook group, grow your social likes and all that. So yeah, lots of people heard of that.
You know, a lot of people say, “Oh, grow your messenger list, because the open rates are much better”, right? Email list is only like 20% open rates, and you get 90% on messenger, right?
Now, all that is fine.
But there’s one thing here that I want you guys to remember. And this is very important. No matter what, you grow those lists on social media, you grow that lists on messenger. You grow that list – your Instagram followers, your
LinkedIn followers whatever.
It’s owned by the company. It’s not owned by you – And just like my friend Vince Tan.
Just recently, he promoted this group, grew this group, this list, right? And because a few people complained to Facebook, you know, haters, whatever. Facebook shut down his group, right? So his group had like, I think, you know, 4000 people of paying people. And then Facebook just decided, ‘No, we’re shutting it down because we got too many complaints’.
So you can’t base your business where you are subject to the whims of someone else, right? You can’t grow a sustainable business that way. It’s a risky way to grow your business, right?
So that’s why I believe it is important to grow your email list,
because at least you own that list.
Okay?
And no one can take that away from you.
So Facebook can change its algorithm. Google can change its search function, all that kind of stuff.
And I remember, we got hit, in my last business in 2011 by this Google Panda update. And we lost our rankings. But thankfully, we still have that, you know, 10 plus thousand database to continue the business, right?
So yeah, don’t rely on whatever the all the fancy stuff out there. Ultimately you want to build your list.
Another example recently I read was that this author wanted to promote his book.
So he went to this influencer that had millions of followers on social media and paid the influencer to promote his book. You know, read the book, and all that kind of stuff, show his photos, talk about the book. And, you know, the sales of the book did not actually go up much at all. It just went up blip. The reason why he achieved best-selling status was because of his email list and other people’s email list that he got people to email out to.
So what I’m trying to say here is like, you know, people on the email list are more likely to buy, okay? Compared to like, say, social media followers and groups and all that. They’re not as committed to buy for some reason, as compared to someone on an email list, right?
So that is why it’s important to grow and own your list, okay?
So, yeah.
So it’s effective in generating sales.
And then the third thing I want you to realise that when you’re building an email list,
it’s an asset that’s a valuable asset for the long-term.
So say, for example, you got a list of 10,000 right? Now you can approach other people and say, “let’s do some cross marketing”, right? For example, if you agree to promote their product, that’s not competing, you can get a cut of that whatever they sell for promoting their product to your list, okay?
And also, you can also now approach people that have bigger, as big of a list or bigger list and say, right, let’s do a webinar together for example. You promote it to your list. I promote it to my list, right? Free marketing. Suddenly bam, your list of 10,000 now you’re suddenly, you get exposed to another, maybe 10, 15,000 on their list as well.
And finally, it’s also a valuable business asset as well. If you decide to sell your business down the track, right? One of the key things people ask, how big is your email list? How big is your customer list, right?
So, all this are more reasons why you should be growing your list okay?
Step 1: Email Service
Okay, you need to have a email service, right?
Okay, so why it’s important to find a good email service is few things.
First of all, you need to make sure that you have a service that has good deliverability. Meaning, if you send out a 100 emails, you want as many as possible to actually get to the recipient.
Now, some email services, they have low deliverability, which means if you send out 100 emails, maybe only like 93 emails get out there. The other seven emails may go missing or whatever, out of every 100. That is the first thing you need to check out, all right?
Step 2: Conduct Automation
So, for example, when someone signs up to your email list, you want to make sure that these, you have emails going out to people consistently automatically, right?
You don’t want to be, you know, basically sending out emails to each individual, because that’s too much time.
And also, this is also helpful when it comes to sales as well.
So say, for example, like you sent out an offer email, right? And then someone clicks and the others don’t click. But that person that clicks, maybe you want to set up a separate automations with a separate message sequence that goes out to this person who clicks, because they’re obviously more interested. And those that don’t click, for example, you might have a different sequence that goes out to them. Different email sequence that goes out to them. Giving them more education first before they might click and then go to this other sequence, right?
So that’s also very important, the automation.
Step 3: Tagging
Where your email system should allow you to tag based on actions in the past taken. Like, for example, my email system, I’m able to tag who’s been to my webinars, right? Who’s been, maybe, reading my blogs, right? So I know after a while, I’m able to look at which people have been clicking on my stuff more and participating more versus the group that is not active.
And eventually I might, if the group is not active, not opening my emails and I’m not tagging them, maybe I will actually delete them and get rid of them down the track, okay? Because they’re just wasting space.
So recently we did a purge. So anyone that did not open my emails in the last six months, we just deleted all of them. Because if they’re not opening my emails for six months, then you know, they’re waste of space and I’m just paying for it. Right? So it’s no point to have them in your list.
And the chances of them marking you as spam later on is also greater. So I just delete them.
Okay, and privacy.
So yeah, so make sure you have good security with that.
So let me explain that a bit more.
So my suggestions is to use Active Campaign and AWeber. These are the two services I recommend, okay?
Active Campaign is what we currently use, and we find that it’s got a lot of good features in terms of automation, in terms of tagging and everything. It’s a little bit on the pricey side. And also, the deliverability of Active Campaign is very high, okay? So you can check them out on activecampaign.com. So it depends on how many people in your list there are, they will charge you a certain fee, okay?
So the other system is Aweber. Okay, Aweber has been around for a long, long time, like since for 17 years, or 18 years. It’s been around for long, long time. So they are a very trustworthy provider, okay? So these two are the ones I would recommend for you to use. So, but if you’re happy with the ones that you’re using, that’s fine.
Okay, there was a case in point where I read recently about MailChimp.
So MailChimp, as you know, it’s quite a popular service.
Some of you are also using it, and because they have a free thing going on for the first 2000 people.
But if you are involved in anything that’s slightly like controversial or political, I wouldn’t even suggest using MailChimp. Because recently there was a case where someone sent out a opinion blast to their email list and a recipient in that list went to Twitter to complain about this guy and tagged MailChimp, right? And MailChimp straight away deleted that guy’s account, right? Which I found was very, very scary because, you know, you don’t want to build a list, spend all that effort and build a list and then MailChimp decides to shut your account.
So I’m not touching MailChimp myself personally.
And after reading that case, I wouldn’t suggest anyone do MailChimp, okay? Regardless if you are already using MailChimp, what I suggest is you make sure you backup your list on a weekly basis, right? So in case they ban you or whatever reason.
And this applies to all email services, make sure you do backups on a regular basis.
So that you don’t lose whatever hard work you’ve done in the past, all right?
So an email service is basically what allows you to send out an email blast. It allows you to maintain your database, okay?
Just that’s what it is in a nutshell, okay?
For those of you who are not so tech-savvy, this is what it allows you to do.
Okay, let’s move on to the next.
Build Your List
So once you have your email system, your software, the second thing is to build your list, right?
And we’ve talked about this as well to Christopher right? Christopher Chan here. So, Christopher we talked about.
Make sure, first of all, your list should be your customer and prospect lists, right? Anyone that comes in, calls your office or whatever. Make sure you get their names and emails down and make sure to get permission to email them, right, to enter into your email system.
If they are customer already, and you have the details, yeah, it’s pretty okay to email them but you know, make sure you maybe send out the first email, just to say, you know why you’re on the list, you know, what we’ll be doing and sending out what kind of emails we’ll be sending out moving forward that can help you, okay?
So make sure you, first of all, you use your in-house list to start building your list.
Now, do not go and buy lists, okay? So, you might go and be tempted to go on Fiverr, or some of this other websites and say, “Yeah, buy 10,000 email list for 50 bucks or whatever”, or you know, hot buyers and all that. Don’t buy those lists, okay? You can get your whole system banned if you buy that list okay?
Get on the black list as well.
The other thing is to not scrape list.
So you might come across all this, people who say “Yeah, I can scrape all your LinkedIn contacts, and then you can put it into your email list”. Okay? Don’t do that either.
And also don’t export all your LinkedIn contacts into a list and start emailing them, okay? You could be marked as spam, and you get marked by spam, your email deliverability rate will drop, okay?
So make sure you don’t do that.
