What should you email to your list?
BusinessLet’s say you have a list: people who have signed up to receive emails from you. What do you do then? What do you really send to people?
The Michael Senoff Approach: Email Offers
Michael Senoff has a large volume of interviews, recordings, and other digital marketing products. They are also quite good.
Michael’s approach is to create an offer with a watch. Maybe it is a big discount, more than 96% in some cases. The product may disappear after a while. You will send out a few emails for a few days about this offer, increasing to send batches on the last day.
This works for several reasons:
It has a lot of products, so you can have a sale on the go every two weeks or so.
Deals are incredibly valuable – I’m talking pocket change for hours of one-time interviewing and training.
His emails are mostly entertaining, although with such great deals, he also gets away with cheeky sales pitches.
If all you do is occasionally spam people, you won’t fly. But if you are consistent, offer something that only a lunatic would reject and do it with charm, you can achieve it.
The Bob Bly Approach: Email Newsletters
Bob Bly is a legend in marketing circles, so what he does is worth paying attention to.
Send two emails a week: one is a short sales pitch about a product of yours, the other is some thoughts on love, life, and marketing. Then send out a monthly newsletter, a collection of short articles, ideas, and offers.
Bob knows that a monthly newsletter, and nothing else, is not a great idea. If people subscribe and haven’t heard from you for three weeks, they will probably forget they signed up and will mark you as spam. And no matter how good your newsletter is, it’s very little content for a month.
Still, a newsletter is a great way to share articles that you find, articles that you write, and articles that you borrow from other people. With your permission, of course, although if your list is good enough, they will beg you to include something in your newsletter.
Ben Settle’s approach: diary + emails
Ben sends at least one email to his list every day, often more.
And every email includes a link to something you are selling.
Why aren’t you being flagged as a spammer all the time? Why do people actually love being on your list?
Some reasons:
First of all, it is informative and entertaining. You can learn a lot from just what it says on your list. You can learn even more by finding out how he says it.
Second, he has a great personality. Your emails are addictively good.
Third, it makes offers that no one else can. Some are cheap, some are not, but they are hard to compare to what others are doing.
As a marketer, this approach might scare you. It involves writing a lot, which means being disciplined and knowledgeable. It also involves selling a lot to your list, which not everyone is comfortable doing.
Still, this is my preferred approach. And it is what I recommend to people that they at least give it a try.
Writing all of this becomes easy when necessary.
And you build your relationship with your readers like nothing else.
But only if you are valuable and entertaining.