What’s up Super Trainers?
Mike Salvietti here from Long Island, New York.
Ever since Sam and I wrote 7-figure e-mails a year ago I’ve learned a ton of stuff about e-mail marketing.
Some of it I learned from researching what experts in other industries are doing and teaching and some from personal observation and tracking with my own lists.
So today I wanted to share some of the best ones with you.
1. Offline businesses shouldn’t market like online businesses – I see too many trainers trying to copy what the online gurus are doing with their e-mail lists. Even worse I see too many online gurus teaching these techniques to offline business owners when, in fact, marketing an offline business should be a lot simpler. Because you are in a relationship business, the goal should always be to get them in the door, face-to-face with you, in as few steps as possible. So if you are running an e-mail campaign to reactivate past clients and get prospects in the door, don’t make things complicated with shopping carts, sales pages, blog posts etc. Just get them to reply to your e-mail saying, “I Want In!”
2. Content e-mails can sell as good as or better than sales e-mails – You don’t need to constantly sell to your list to get them to convert into a paying client. If they are on your list, chances are, for the most part, they know what you do and don’t need to be constantly reminded. In fact, constantly selling to your list only leads to lower open rates, more buyer resistance and less urgency. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sent out a great piece of content to my list over the last year that didn’t mention my bootcamps or personal training, but, instead, hit a hot button that my prospects connected with which drove them to ask me about coming back or trying out my programs. No pitch or selling needed. Even if that doesn’t happen, there is a compound effect that will show a return down the road. It will build trust and increase open rates.
3. The e-mail subject line is highly over rated – most gurus will tell you that the subject line of your e-mail has one of the greatest impacts on your e-mail open rate. Not true. Your relationship with your list has the biggest affect. Do you converse with your list? Do you send them useful information without selling anything? If not, try this e-mail to your list immediately.
Subject: Hey
Body: It’s been a while…..how have you been?
No signature or sign out or link to your website, just that one sentence.
4. Unsubscribes are a good thing – If you aren’t getting unsubscribes at least once a month, you’re being boring. People don’t remember boring. They don’t talk or think about things that were boring. They don’t share e-mails that were boring. If you have a message to share with your list that you know they won’t all agree with, share it anyways. Trust me; it will resonate with the important people, your rock stars, or the prospects that have potential to be rock stars.
5. List interaction increases your e-mail delivery rate – remember that e-mail I told you to send in number 3? That e-mail will actually increase your e-mail delivery rate with ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo, me, Aol, Hotmail etc. More opens, clicks, shares and replies equate to a better sender reputation (your reputation with their e-mail provider as a sender) over the LONG TERM.
6. The more you send the better – Every day is best. If you don’t send to your list often, not only will they respond less, open less and care less but your deliverability rate drops as well.
7. Smaller or industry specific e-mail marketing providers have higher delivery rates now – Go into your e-mail spam folder and search Aweber, the most popular e-mail marketing software by most marketers. Chances are you’re going to see a lot of e-mails pop up from lists you’re subscribed to that use Aweber.
For a long time now, Aweber has been known to have the highest delivery rate of all the e-mail software around, but because of its popularity, a lot of spammy, shady marketers now use it and this has completely hurt its reputation. For this reason I recommend a more industry specific e-mail marketing software like super-trainer formula because you won’t have to worry about the shady marketing types using it that you typically see online.
So those are 7 of the best things I learned this year about e-mail marketing. If you’d like to ramp up your e-mail marketing and bring in boat loads of new and past customers in the coming year then keep an eye out for 7-figure e-mails 2.0.
Michael Salvietti