Email Marketing
Intimacy.
It’s not a word that is often used to describe the marketing relationship between businesses and customers. In fact, most marketing relationships resemble the opposite of intimacy. They usually consist of one-way communications consisting of sales hype and propaganda clumsily thrust between people and the things that are important to them. This is interruption marketing and it’s becoming less effective every single day.
The ideal relationship with your customers and prospects is one in which they give you permission to communicate with them directly. In order to achieve this you must first establish trust. And to establish trust you must provide value in a manner that delights and exceeds expectations. Assuming that you have a plan to accomplish this (and you will when you work with us) your customers will eventually raise their hand and ask you to provide them with information about your products, services and company. One of the best ways to maintain this relationship is via email.
Email is one of the most intimate forms of communication available to marketers. It is immediate, direct, and, when executed properly, has the feel of one-to-one communication, even when used on a large scale. The secret to using email effectively lies in understanding how to create campaigns that are relevant, valuable, and eagerly anticipated.
Enter the inner sanctum.
Email has become a critical social and organizational tool. Studies show that many people become over-stressed and anxious when disconnected from their inbox for relatively short periods of time. Email is the “inner sanctum” of modern electronic communication. It’s where you receive feedback from your boss, make weekend plans with friends, send proposals to clients, send a shopping list to your spouse and collaborate with coworkers. You pay attention to your email, your customers do too.
When someone grants your permission to communicate with them directly and personally through email, you’ve gone a long way towards earning their trust. It opens up a channel of communication that is much deeper than those available using traditional advertising methods. If you have something important to tell your customers and need 3 pages of text to do it, go right ahead. As long as the content is good you’ll have their full attention.
Although email is very personal, it doesn’t mean that all email is treated that way. Everyone has their own priority list for opening and reading the messages that appear in their inbox. There are senders whose messages are eagerly anticipated and read upon receipt. On the other hand, there are senders (spammers) that get deleted upon sight. It’s not just about getting access, it’s about providing so much value that your customers cannot wait to see what you send them next.
Email is not free postage stamps.
Forget about the fact that email is essentially free to send. Yes, it’s an attractive feature of the medium, but it’s also one of the most dangerous. Low cost and ease of use has made email one of the most abused advertising vehicles in existence.
The competition for your customer’s inbox is intense. Over 90% of the email they receive is unwanted spam. In order to break through this clutter, you need customers that are looking out for your mail and are willing to sort through a ton of junk to get to it. This will not happen if you inundate them with weak offers, self-promotion, generic sales promotions and other information that isn’t timely and relevant.
Taking email to the next level.
We’re going to help you go beyond the “batch and blast” techniques that most companies use for email marketing. Our email marketing programs not only help you leverage your in-house list, we also create systems that consistently attract new prospects into your database and convert them into customers via carefully crafted campaigns that are completely automated. We’ll segment your database and create autoresponders, newsletters, upsell sequences, nurturing sequences, lead conversion sequences, promotional offers and other content to build rock-solid, profitable relationships with your customers and prospects.