In the online world whether you like it or not, email marketing is going to be important. You may be thinking that emails are dying off and you might think everything needs to be done by social media. You are not even close.
People are on social media, but that is not where the sales are. People are not there to buy anything. That is what your lovely emails are for.
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Social media is for building relationships and getting to know people. You use that to bring them to your website — your hub. That is your presence and once you get them to the website, you can ask for permission to market to them.
That is how you build this up and start to explain your expertise on the products or services that you offer.
Now — what I want to talk to you about today are the emails that are sometimes irrelevant to what you are selling, but need to be sent out to connect with your customers — but these types of emails go straight into the spam folder.
This subject comes up from an email I received from a fairly larger company that their email wound up in my spam folder.
Now — I am not talking about viagra emails or anything like that — those are basically spam emails. I am talking about larger companies that are well known that should know better.
The company I am talking about is Feefo. They do reviews and such. Basically if you purchase anything online, you will get an email from this company asking how you liked the product, etc etc.
Then, they give the store a rating based on your review and some stores have thousands of reviews, but those are sent out by email.
Because I am e-commerce store I get these emails from time to time and that is how this came about so today I am going to explain to you what they are doing wrong and hope it helps you from making the same mistake.
If I didn’t open my spam folder I would have never seen this and this just goes to show you that they are doing this with a lack of effort.
So let me dive into what I think needs to be improved on this email
Buying An Email List
As you can tell from this email they definitely purchased an email list to send out emails to. Now — let me be clear – if you are in business for yourself, never ever ever buy into an email list.
No one ever accidentally subscribes to your email list so don’t waste your money buying a list of names of people who have no clue who you actually are or what you actually do.
The Opening Sentence
The opening sentence reads — “Dear Sir/Madam”
Now — you can obviously tell that they know nothing about me at all. They don’t know my name, haven’t looked me up, etc.
If they had taken at least just a second to look up my website, they would have found out quickly who I am and what I do. Then they could have made the email say ‘Dear Jon’ and I would have thought — hey they know me.
The Body of the Email
Now in the body of this email they start asking me questions like, “Do you know how important e-commerce and online reviews are?”
Now – if they had looked at my website, they would have known that of course I know that because, that is what I do for a living.
To me that says that you don’t care who I am or what I do and that I am not worth the time of you researching that before you email me.
The Free Trial
Of course after telling me how important everything is, then they say “click here to get your free trial”. What? We haven’t even been introduced yet and here you are trying to get me to click through to your free trial.
I don’t care about your free trial. I don’t even really know who you are.
You have to wait and get to know me first before trying to cram something like that down my throat. You have to get me to trust and like you a bit.
The Long List of Companies
Next on the email was a list of all the places that they have done business with in the past. Honestly– this information is irrelevant to me. I could care less who has done business with this client in the past. How does that help me?
The thing is, most of those businesses have nothing to do with what I do. Had you taken the time to look at my site, you would have seen a list of companies who are relevant and would have caught my attention had you listed those instead.
The point here is to take the time to get to know who you are emailing. Spend some time researching who they are before hitting them up like that.
Now I know you may be thinking, how can they do that if they have a list of 10,000 people. You are looking at it the wrong way.
Don’t buy the list in the first place, but if you do, go through the list one at a time. How many sales do you need?
The Closing of the Email
At the end of the email, they said something like “if you are interested, please contact us and we will get back to you”.
A person sent it out, so why not personalize the email? Add your name and phone number and have them contact YOU, not just anyone.
Contact people one at a time. When you send out an email you can talk to them individually. Don’t mass email them. It is a big no no in this day in age of e-commerce building.
Monday Book Recommendation
Today is Monday and here is the book for the week. Today we are talking about the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz who also wrote the book we talked about recently — The Pumpkin Plan.
Profit first is an accounting term. He discovered that most profits are made from sales minus expenses, but he did a little change in that.
He found that by changing this one thing, he was able to change up his business It is a very simple and very powerful message that will help you be able to have a very successful business.
Be sure to check it out. It is a great book with lots of pertinent info. It is a simple system that will transform your business.
I will be back tomorrow with another simple tip. Happy Halloween.
