Paradigm Shift: How You Sell With Email Is Changing
Over the last few weeks I’ve been listening to recordings of Perry Marshall’s Live Workshop on email autoresponders held in Chicago. It’s some really great content, direct from one of the online marketers I trust the most.
Perry really hammered home a point that on some levels, I haven’t fully taken to heart in the past.
That point is, for long term success, you can’t expect to survive the changing online business environment, without fully cementing your place as a leader by constantly delivering trust-building quality content.
This isn’t anything new of course, but realizing how to truly embed this ethos into how you run your business, and in particular for us online entrepreneurs and how we market through email, is more difficult than you might think.
Why? Because it’s so easy to fall for the lure of the quick buck.
It’s too easy to be lazy, and most people aren’t prepared to wait and put in the effort to establish themselves. They want a return on their work in a matter of weeks or a few short months, not the years it’s going to take to build your following, set up systems and ultimately, establish a quality business.
Perry sums up this idea using a great example in how to operate an email marketing campaign using autoresponders.
Most online marketers in recent years have built email lists that they essentially use to constantly promote affiliate products and launches. Finding a marketer who sends content out to their list, even as often as 50% of the emails they send, is rare.
As Perry explains, once customers get sick of the spam, it’s those marketers who built an autoresponder system that uses quality content to foster trust, and not hit their customers with excessive pitches, who succeed.
When the water rises, only those who have built a strong fortification survive. The rest drown.
The water is definitely rising right now in the Internet marketing industry.
It’s pretty clear, in the make money niche, the majority of marketers, even the best ones, have at times abused their lists by sending out too much pitch and not enough content, and I’m including myself in this claim. This could have worked in the past, but we’re reaching a saturation point. It’s safe to say that long term, you won’t survive by sending only emails that ask people to buy something.
I know this is true, because I’ve felt the change in my business. Email response rates are down. I choose to say no to promoting new launches now more than ever before because I know each promotion I do damages relationships with my list. People are sick of the same pitches, from the same people using the same trigger points. Our customers are getting wiser to fluff and consequently gravitating towards substance.
Perry really emphasized this point throughout his workshop, and he’s not alone, I’ve taken the idea to heart in the last few months so much that it has shifted my entire focus in 2010.
I plan to continue to be about substance even more so than in the past, which considering most of my current marketing is about content, says a lot about how important I think this change is.
The Emotional Bank Account
Core Influence: Frank Kern On How To Connect With Your Audience
When I got home from my travels I finally had some time to go through some of the DVDs and CDs that came in the mail from various purchases I had made.
I bought Traffic Secrets 2.0 from John Reese when he released it mid last year and Frank Kern was nice (smart) enough to throw in a couple of bonus DVDs to the first group of buyers, and I was one of them.
I’m a fan of Frank Kern simply because he’s a good entertainer in his videos and obviously he’s great at selling through email when it comes to Internet marketing products, but to be honest I’ve never been blown away by his marketing advice. That being said, I’ve never seen much of his work outside of his free videos, so I really need to spend more time with the surfer dude slash internet marketer.
With Traffic Secrets Frank threw in two DVD presentations. One of his very early Mass Control presentations and another on Core Influence, which I thought was the better of the two and the one I want to talk about now.
What Is Core Influence?
If You Can’t Write Words That Sell You Don’t Make Money
As you likely know, Gideon and I wrapped up the opening marketing campaign for Become A Blogger Premium a couple of weeks ago. During that period we both wrote lots of emails to our various subscribers, email being the primary communication method and also the distribution channel for delivering resources like the Roadmap report.
Most of you haven’t met Gideon or myself in person, but if you did, you would see we are both down to earth and soft spoken – not your typical extroverted, in-your-face marketers. Of course what you perceive as over-the-top might be different to another person so you may not agree, but I’m pretty comfortable saying that Gideon and I are way below average when it comes to the hype-o-meter.
One interesting observation I made during our launch that you probably weren’t aware of, was Gideon’s email marketing style (his writing style when promoting), compared to how he is in his videos.
Gideon has difficulty doing any kind of “sales pitch” in his videos, he much prefers to focus on content, and if you watch the few parts at the end of his videos where he was promoting our paid course, you could tell he wasn’t pushing very hard at all.
However, when Gideon wrote emails, he wasn’t afraid to use his marketing skills. He knows the triggers, is quite comfortable pushing all the right buttons and isn’t afraid of saying whatever it takes to convince you that you need to do what he suggests.
This is important because if Gideon couldn’t sell the premium course when it came time to sell it, then our results would have been negatively impacted. At some point in business you have to be prepared to sell.
The same goes for anything else we promote through email, whether it’s to convince people to watch a free video, or download a report or read a blog post. It’s not always about eliciting a purchase, it’s any time you want people to click a link or even just open an email in the first place – any action at all is impacted by your ability to “sell” the benefits of taking that action through the words that you use.
I asked Gideon if he had studied copywriting – and he has – which explains his ability to talk in marketing speak when communicating via email when necessary, yet it doesn’t show up in other forms of communication with him. Gideon has learned skills that are vital to his success as an Internet marketer, and you can too.
Be Your Self
How Email Segmentation Made My List Stronger AND $31,940 More Profitable
This is a somewhat advanced email marketing tactic, although most serious email marketers having been doing it for years. For me though, this is something I’ve only recently been able to test because I haven’t had the technological resources to do so.
I recently upgraded my AWeber account to the “new” version. In case you missed the news about the new AWeber upgrades, the CEO Tom Kulzer and his team recently rolled out some nice advanced email marketing features.
The features let you create segmentations in your lists based on various elements, such as who opened your email and who clicked your links within the emails. There are other options as well, but for the purpose of this article let’s just focus on these two basic segmentations.
Before upgrading my account I was on the legacy version of AWeber, which is basically the same service, except I didn’t have as much power to segment my lists and consequently, beyond deciding which list I would broadcast too, I didn’t do much else. As a result, I generally hit all my newsletter with each message – a shotgun approach to email marketing.
Unfortunately (or really, fortunately) for me, my list is probably a bit larger than the average at AWeber, and with their new services came a new pricing structure, which meant I would pay more than five times per month than what I was previously, if I decided to upgrade. I eventually decided to bite the bullet because I know how good a service it is, how important my newsletter is to my business, and of course the primary reason – so I could test the new features.
Luckily for most of you reading this, if you are just starting out your email newsletter, the AWeber fee hasn’t really changed even for the new features. You’re still going to pay the very justified price of around the sub-$20 a month mark for a business-critical service. In my case, with some 40,000+ members of my newsletter, the fee is a little bit more.
In case you haven’t started your newsletter, here’s my review to help you decide whether AWeber is right for you – AWeber Email Autoresponder Review.
Now let me explain how I made use of the new features and how you can implement these advanced email marketing techniques…
The Problem With The Shotgun Approach
Can You Make Money Online Without Lying?
I wanted to use the word “honesty” in the title for this blog post, but I expect the word “Lying” will pull more attention. However don’t let that mislead you, this article is about using honesty in your marketing, not lying.
At the start of September you may recall StomperNet offered their Stomping The Search Engines 2 course for the cost of shipping if you were willing to try their new print newsletter. They made money off this offer because of the multiple upsells involved during the ordering process and the potential for rebills if customers decided to stay subscribed to the print newsletter.
I had no problem with this offer, in fact I thought it was a good deal and promptly blogged about it and sent a notice to my newsletter too.
Besides a brief hiccup that killed the opening day, StomperNet did well, and many of you, my readers, grabbed the offer.
A few days later Brad and Andy at StomperNet decided to up the ante a little and with the help of many of their top Internet marketing friends, put together a bonus package that was, well, a little over the top.
Guys like Ed Dale, Jeff Johnson, Jeff Walker, Rich Schefren, Mike Filsaime, Paul Colligan and Shawn Casey (and others) gave everything from teleseminar downloads, audio files, free months in coaching programs, reports and more on top of what was already offered by StomperNet, just for the cost of shipping. That offer has since passed, though you can still buy the course and trial the first month of the newsletter if you pay for sending it to you.
