Episode 007: Why Email Marketing is Important

Episode Summary: 

As a website owner it can feel daunting to sort through the various marketing options available. In this episode, Julie discusses why email marketing is so critically important and why it tends to have far better returns than most other marketing methods available.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer

Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Savvy Business Method, with your host Julie Feickert.

Julie Feickert

Hello and welcome to episode seven of the Savvy Business Method podcast where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your business online. I'm Julie Feickert and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family.

Let's dive in today's topic, which is why email marketing is so important. I know you're busy, you're trying to balance managing a website, answering customers' questions, shipping orders, figuring out which forms of marketing are going to work and not leave you broke. So today my goal is to convince you that email marketing is something you really need to be doing. And there's a decent chance it'll end up being less costly and more effective than a lot of the other options you have available for marketing.

Now, if you've listened to this podcast for a few episodes, or you've checked out my YouTube channel, you've probably seen that I'm a huge fan of email marketing. And I'm hoping by the end of the podcast today, you will understand why and share my enthusiasm and start working each and every day on continuing to build your email list, so that you can create a sustainable and stable revenue stream for your website.

All right, let's dive in. So what is so different about email compared to other marketing methods we have available to us? Well, one of the things that I love about email is assuming you have built your list in a legal manner, right? You didn't go out and buy a list, you have collected these email addresses legitimately, then your email list is an asset that can be used for your business. This is different than, let's say, you build up a social media group like a Facebook group, or YouTube channel subscribers, where you're ultimately building this group of people that you can marketing to on someone else's property. And when you build on someone else's property, you are ultimately having to trust that they are not going to take away your ability to do business there, or change the rules to make it difficult for you to generate a profit.

That's a really scary way to do business. I mean sometimes it works out fine, but a lot of people end up getting burned anytime algorithm's changed, rate's changed, rule's changed. But email is really different. Your list belongs to your company. Sure, there can be little changes in the laws, or maybe Gmail changes the way they lay out their email and you end up in a promotion box instead of an inbox. But all of these things can be worked around. Nobody is going to take away your ability to use your email system, or at least I sincerely hope not. Not foreseeing that happening anytime soon.

Another thing I really like about email is that growing your email list can be as costly as you want it to be or not. I would actually argue that being persistent is more important for growing an email list than what your budget is.

Now, to be faire, if you need to grow your email list very very quickly, and you need it to be very large, then yes, you would probably need a substantial advertising budget so that you can run social media ads, or pay some bloggers, to advertise your company so you can get the traffic, so that you can collect those emails.

But email is also something that you can organically collect over time. And you do that by optimizing your website like we talked about a couple episodes ago, where you're optimizing your website to collect as many email addresses as possible from the visitors to your websites.

And if you do that consistently and you have decent traffic, your list will just continue to grow over time, and you will long-term have that really great asset that you can use to generate revenue for your company.

The second thing I love about email marketing is that compared to most other forms of web marketing, email is really inexpensive. You may have some costs with building your list, right? Like we talked about, if you need to build that list really quickly maybe you have some advertising cost that goes into that. You then will need to use an email service provider to end out your email. That has a monthly cost as well.

But here's the thing, when you start calculating how much it costs to actually send those individual emails, we're generally talking fractions of a penny. That's amazing. Where else are you gonna get advertising that inexpensively? So really the hard and potentially expensive part here is getting people on your list. Once they're there, that list costs you very little money a month to maintain, and you get to send generally as many emails as you want, depending on the service you're signed up for.

There is no cost generally for like per 1000 impressions like you're gonna pay Facebook, or like you're gonna pay AdRoll, or any of these other services. Instead, you're going to paying for the privilege of sending email, or even if you're paying per email, you're still paying a very tiny amount.

Email also has a lot of flexibility in terms of timing built-in. You know when we create an ad online, you're generally submitting that ad for consideration, and the period of time it can take to get your ads approved and running can generally be up to 24 hours. So it makes it really hard to market on a moment-by-moment basis.

So let me give you an example. Let's say that a certain couple of states suddenly have major traffic issues, okay? One day, and this is on national news, there's a bunch of construction going on, and a whole bunch of the population decided to stay home from work that day. You could take that information and say, "Well, maybe people are online shopping, let me try to get my products in front of them." You could go put together an ad on AdRoll, or Facebook, or Instagram, or something like that, and submit your ad, and odds are good that there would be a delay, right? Because your ad needs to be approved, that's totally normal. Or you could also throw together an email, and you could probably get that email thrown together and out to those specific people, 'cause you can generally do some geotargeting, get that out to those specific people via email a great deal more quickly. And people get that in their inbox, and they can start shopping.

So not a perfect example, but I just wanna get the wheels in your head turning that email is something that you have so much more control over than a lot of the other advertising mediums that are out there.

For busy entrepreneurs, email is also probably the most efficient way of doing marketing, because there is so much power in automation. So with email, we can set up different lists and have emails automatically sent to our customers based on their behavior.

So let me give you some examples. You can send emails when someone initially signs up for your list. You can use that opportunity to help them get to know your company to provide them with an incentive to come back and purchase, right? 'Cause they're a warm lead, we wanna get them back and purchasing right away. You can help them understand what your social media options are. You can introduce them to your staff, or help establish that brand and rapport with them.

When someone comes back and visits your website, you can send them a followup email. And the really cool thing is you can do this based on whether or not something's cart. If something's their cart, you can send them an email reminding them to make a purchase. And if something wasn't in their cart, then you can just follow up and ask them if they had any questions about the products they looked at.

You can also send emails to follow up on a purchase. So when someone buys something from you, you have the option of sending a series of emails. You can send an email initially thanking them for their purchase, and then maybe a couple of days later, double-checking that their order arrived safely and that they're happy with it. Maybe a couple weeks after that you could send an email asking for a review.

And then once you reach the end of your normal sales cycle, you can go ahead and send them an email reminding them to come back and replace the item or to buy another item.

You can also set up groups for customers that you consider to me VIPs. So for example in the past I've had a list that would automatically send a special coupon code to someone 72 hours after they had made their third purchase with us. Just a way of thanking them and acknowledging that their business, or their purchases are an important part of my business.

You can also send email to win back customers. So you can set up a list that automatically triggers when it's been a certain period of time, maybe three, four, five, six months since they made their last purchase. You can set up a win-back campaign to strategically bring people back into your purchase cycle. I mean how cool is this. You just set these emails up, you set the rules up, and then they just run, and sure you wanna get in there every once and a while, and make some tweaks and changes, and look at your statistics to make sure everything's performing. But you're not getting in there every day deciding which people are going to get which emails. The system does that for you automatically. This is a massive time savings.

And you combine that with the idea that you own your list, and that email itself is pretty inexpensive on a monthly basis, I mean this is powerful.

So just in case you weren't taking your email marketing seriously, I hope I have begun to convince you that this is really something that you should be working on every day. We want to be adding emails to our list every day. And then, you know, once a week get in to look at your statistics and start tweaking your email campaigns. The goal here is to get more and more efficient, so we can generate more and more revenue for less cost.

Now, if you need some ideas for ways to gather more email addresses, for the most part for free, check out episode one where I talked about six ways to grow your email list by making fairly minor changes to your website.

So that's it for today, I'll be back in your feed in a few days, and in the mean time, thank you so much for joining me today. I hope this information will help you make better decisions for your own business. If you have feedback or ideas for future shows, you can find me at SavvyBusinessMethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube, and please be sure to hit that subscribe button in iTunes and Stitcher, so you don't miss an episode, and of course I would greatly appreciate if you can rate/review this podcast in iTunes, it really does help others find it. I promise I will be ever with you, and I just love hearing from you guys. Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe. And for more great content and to stay up to date, visit SavvyBusinessMethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.

Episode 007: Why Email Marketing is Important