[VLOG] 4 Steps to Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing is your bread and butter to any business you run.  Even when I had my two local businesses, every time I would send out a newsletter people would book.  It's just that top of mind place that you really always want to be with your customers.

There are four very general questions I'm frequently asked when it comes to email marketing, and so I thought I would take the opportunity to cover them here.

1. How often should you send out an email?  This really depends on the type of business you have, and the initial expectations you set when they sign up.  If you tell them they're signing up for a daily email, then by all means you better be sending out a daily email.  However, you just have to keep up with whatever you're setting those expectations to be.  I see people do this all the time, they send out an email, and then they disappear off the face of the earth.  What ends up happening is when you finally do send another email, those people have no idea who you are.  When you always want to be at that top of mind.

It could be once a week or even once every two weeks, but I wouldn't recommend anything less than once a month.  Just be sure you're setting up those expectations, and you're actually following through.  It's better if you're being consistent with the schedule that you set up, that's going to work.

2. What service should you use for email marketing?  There are a ton of options out there.  However, there are four of the basic and bigger ones.  Aweber and Mailchimp fall in the same category.  They are a little harder to use, and a little smaller scale.  They may not give you all the detail that you need, but for starting, they're a great place to start.  I used Aweber, and was happy with them before I moved over to Infusionsoft.  The other two huge ones Infusionsoft and Ontraport.  They're going to be a little more robust, but also more expensive.   So make sure your budget can handle something like that, but they do give you some great data.

There's also Constant Contact, and iContact.  It just comes down to picking one and getting started on it.

3. To confirm an opt-in or not to confirm?  If you are in Canada, you do have to do the double opt-in, otherwise you may get fined.  Now what I'm talking about when it comes to a confirmed opt-in, is when someone opts in to your list, before you send them anything, you send them a confirmation email, making sure it's okay for you to keep sending them emails.   They have to say that 'yes' they want to get emails from you.  What happens is you end up getting quite a few people sitting in email purgatory.

Why I still confirm, is that just because someone requested to get emails from you, your emails might not be getting into their inbox.  So just because they're on your list, doesn't mean they're seeing your emails.  With the confirm, there's a greater chance that they're actually going to be getting the emails in their inbox.  Hopefully, they've set that email so it doesn't go into spam.  We've all been there when we signed up for something, and then suddenly we're getting emails from someone we don't remember requesting information from.

4. How much should you brand your emails?  I learned a lesson from this over the past year.  I thought I was cool like Brendon Burchard, and he didn't do a lot of branding on his emails.  So I thought I would do the same thing.  It was more of a personal letter, and that is exactly what I wanted for my list.  However, I discovered that I didn't have the name recognition like Brendon Burchard.  So what happened was that I did a whole webinar series, and had people signing up via Facebook ads.  Even with a confirmed opt-in, several weeks later, people started marking my emails as spam.  It was like a knife through my heart, and here I even had a double opt-in.  Since I switched my branding, that mark has completely stopped.

Even Brendon Burchard has put a picture down on his newsletter.  I'm not recommending something crazy, like an over produced newsletter.  But do something small, so they know who you are and recognize the branding.

Are there any lessons you've learned from email marketing?  Would love to hear them in the comments below!