Transcript
My name is Maggie Benson. I am the head boss here at Grow My Biz 123, Inc. Welcome and thank you for stopping in. I wanted to do something a little bit different, given the virtual nature of this setting, and do a little bit of an educational video for you in the sense that it makes it a little bit more entertaining and, maybe not entertaining, but engaging for sure, rather than just kind of clicking around the platform as you’re going through the trade show.
So I decided to focus on email marketing in particular because I was talking to a client of mine that’s here in the valley and she had started offering new services and I didn’t know about it. And one of the reasons I didn’t know about it was because she doesn’t have any email marketing. She was relying on social media to get her message out about this program that she was offering.
And with social media, especially myself, I actually am not on social media all the time and the way social media works and the low constantly dropping engagement rate that the platforms are imposing both on Instagram and Facebook, I didn’t see the posts, I didn’t know about it. And I said to her, “Well, if you had email marketing, I know I would’ve saw it.”
So I wanted to address that, take this opportunity to address it. Be a little bit educational. We know from, we being marketers know within the industry that email marketing, and it doesn’t have to be spammy if that’s the first thing in your mind is that, “I get all those spammy emails.” It doesn’t need to be spammy email and I’ll get into that.
We know in the marketing industry, that email is actually the number one way to drive revenue and consumers that purchase products and services through email spend 138% more than those who don’t receive email offers. Social media is great and fantastic. It builds awareness and engagement, but the next step in the customer journey is actually getting them to pick up the phone and call you, submit a form on your website, and to get them on your email list. Really, really important if you have a sales process that’s quite long. People might be interested in your services, but not ready to buy right now. Get them on your email list to get them engaged.
So why email marketing? Well, it does depend if you’re targeting other businesses or if you’re going straight for consumers. Here are some stats that are quite recent for B2B. We know that email’s the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences. Most business professionals, as myself included, prefer email over any other form of communication.
To be honest, if I can’t get on your email list, guaranteed I will forget about you. That’s just the nature of how I think. Click-through rates are higher in B2B emails than say necessarily B2C. Just something to think about if that’s your audience. And again, it’s the most effective channel in terms of revenue generation.
One of my clients and I never talk about who my clients are out of their privacy, but one of my clients I know from Google analytics year after year after year, that their revenue generation is coming from their email. Now is that their original source of where those people came from? No. They’re coming from public relations outreach, and they’re coming from our social ads, and they’re coming from Google ads, and they’re coming from SEO. They’re hitting the website and then they’re joining the email. But when they’re making sales, it’s coming from our email blasts. Super, super important and I have the data to back that up.
If you’re targeting consumers directly, still really important, but the strategy will be a little bit different. Again, you can pause the video, read the stats. I’m not going to read them out, but just the summary of it is still super important. But this strategy is a little bit different, whether you’re B2B or B2C.
So you might be thinking, “Well, what do I send?” Again, it depends on your business and I know that, but things you can include are company updates, awards or accomplishments, user-generated content from social media. People actually really like that. So if someone’s tagging you on social media, save that, reach out to that person, get their permission to then use it in your own marketing, including your emails.
Tips, and tricks, depending on what your trade is. Educational content. So we’ll often write a blog for our clients based on SEO practices. We’ll then use that blog and send out an email blast and take snippets of it and send it out on social media. And it’s called contents indication. So we’re hitting many different avenues of a marketing plan with our clients through one blog, SEO, email, social, all through one thing. You can always do an obviously upcoming promotion and then how they can reach you / take the next step in the customer journey.
When do you send it? This is where people are like, “Well, I don’t want to be too spammy.” No, you don’t want to be spammy. You don’t want to be sending out emails every single day. You will get the unsubscribes by doing that. Once a month. That’s all you need to do. And I would say everybody is capable of sending out a newsletter once a month. It doesn’t matter how big your business is once a month at a minimum. That will keep you in front of mind with appropriate clients.
I have one email blast that I’m on. He’s a photographer of Seattle that I’ve taken courses from that I really enjoy. He sends it out once every two months. I look for that email when it comes up because it doesn’t come up very often and it’s really good quality. For some clients, especially if you’re in the fitness space, doing it every week is more appropriate because you want to say, “This is our upcoming classes,” et cetera, et cetera.
The keys is making sure that you keep your open rates above 20% and your click-through rates above 1%. Those are the kind of generic standards they do vary from industry to industry. But those are kind of the generic standards to do that. If you’re starting to drop off, there can be a variety of different reasons like your content is off, you’re over sending, or your list needs to be culled, which means we go through and remove anybody who’s given you a fake email address or they no longer using that email or whatever.
How do you send it? What’s the technology, the common ESPs, email service providers that people know about our MailChimp and Constant Contact. In my business with my clients, we use something called HighLevel and I left the link there where you can go and look at that. It is more than just an email platform, which is why we have our clients on it, but it does send out email blasts.
So that is quick and dirty. Email is a really big topic. So I’m laughing when I say the quick and dirty overview of email marketing. Hopefully, it plugs a bug in your ear that if you’re not doing it to do it. If you need to reach out to me for any reason, here’s my contact information, take a screenshot of it so that you can come back to it.
And if you want to book a consultation to talk about this, or quite honestly anything, our agency specializes, we do web design, and then we primarily specialize in SEO and digital advertising, so Google ads, social ads, and then we also tie in social media and email marketing around those. But we really are focused on lead generation for service-based businesses is what we actually do. So if you want to talk about any of those services or just email, just book a call with me and we’ll go from there.
And then the last thing I want everybody to know about is if you’re our current chamber member and you should be because it’s great and amazing. I do have a 20% off deal for fellow chamber members. Just make sure you let me know that you are a chamber. Questions, comments, concerns, leave them in the chat. I’m trying to think. I have to reverse my image. In the chat, I’m popping in and out all day, and I’ll get to those answers and questions as much as quickly as possible. Have a wonderful trade show and best of luck and welcome to 2021.
