Social media blah, blah, blah. Email is still the Queen of Web Marketing and will be for as long as I care to predict. Everyone has an email address, we are on it everyday and our emails wait patiently in our inbox for us. Compare that to drinking from the proverbial firehose that is social media where tweets, updates and notifications fly past us unnoticed. Email is how we do business in the online world. Social media is where we socialise.
It’s a privilege and an honour to be welcomed into someone’s inbox, so once you’ve earnt that permission let’s look at what to do next. There are 7 types of emails that you need to add to your marketing arsenal.
Here they are from easiest to hardest.
1. Autoresponder sequence
As time-poor business owners, these emails are your easiest wins because they pay off time and time again, long after you’ve written them. The idea is that you have a pre-scheduled email sequence that you send to new subscribers at set intervals after they sign up. It’s your opportunity to deliver your best stuff on auto-pilot. Even if you’ve only published 2 things on the web, you’ve got enough to start your autoresponder lead nurturing sequence.
2. The I’m a real human email
Somewhere in your autoresponder sequence send one email that asks the reader a question. Explain that you are a real human who actually reads their replies. Send the replies go to your real inbox and answer them all yourself. Don’t worry, it won’t take that long and the upside of having a genuine connection with your readers (aka potential buyers) is massive. Even when you have mega-lists of 200k+ like personal finance expert Ramit Sethi you can still mean it when you tell readers that you at least read every reply.
3. Weekly newsletter with personality
Be personal and friendly, and make the reader the hero. Give them the tools, info, tips or whatever that they can use to improve their skills, tell their friends or impress their boss. Then let your personality shine through and write as you would to a close friend. Is a weekly email too frequent? No, in fact it’s the bare minimum if you don’t want to be forgotten. Subscribers want you to be adding value to their lives each and every week.
4. Sales emails
Selling via email used to make me feel sick in the stomach. After 5 years of delivering free content, I was convinced people would call me names, unsubscribe and ostracise me from me society when I tried to ’sell them something’. Of course it was nowhere near that bad. Yes a few people jumped ship and unsubscribed but hundreds of readers became customers too. The best bit is that they were grateful that we’d finally offered them a way to get their hands on our most valuable content. In my opinion, the best way to view sales emails is that your are inviting the right people to take you up on something that will be extremely valuable and beneficial to them. Here is the Email Sales Copy Template that will serve as a guide to writing effective sales emails.
5. The post-sale wow email
These are the ones you don’t tell people are coming. You follow up customers and write from your own personal email address just to see how they are travelling. Or to add unexpected value. No selling, no asking for referrals, just a friendly how are you going? or what can I help you with?
6. The LinkedIn email
When you’ve got a bunch of readers who are subscribing and replying to your emails, it’s a nice gesture to connect with them on LinkedIn. If you want to take it one step further you may also add them to your circles on Google+.
7. The happy birthday email
This one is hard to pull off because I’ve found most people won’t share their birthday with you until they know you well. That said many readers will know you well enough and will be totally down with it. Even better, they will forget they ever told you and will be blown away when they get their happy birthday email on the day. Feel free to shower them in gifts, but resist the urge to sell. I’ve actually found the thoughtful ‘happy birthday’ email on its own works best. If you gradually add these emails into your marketing you’ll be building your most powerful web asset; a strong and active email list of potential buyers.
