@RonaldNzimora: The amazing power of e-mail marketing (Y! Business)

by Ronald Nzimora

The Amazing Power of Email Marketing In Business: How To Guarantee Your Business Generates Predictable Income Month After Month Using Email

Dear Friend,
2 days ago I was trying to fight off boredom and kill off the last effects of writer’s block so I got on Twitter and started tweeting about business.

I had seen an earlier tweet by a follower asking if email marketing actually worked so I decided to tweets about it.
As I tweeted, I got a flurry of retweets and questions but because I couldn’t spend a lot of time answering I decided to turn the tweets into a full blog post, so here we are.


If you have a business, listen up, because what I am about to tell you will literally change your business. It will make your business generate profit on a massive and consistent basis.

Are you ready?

Here it is.

There are three ways ONLY to grow any business.

Here they are:

1. Increase the number of clients, get more new prospects into paying customers.
2. Increase the average transaction, get each client to buy more at each purchase.
3. Increase the frequency that the average client buys from you, get each customer to buy from you more often.

Think about it, everything you will ever do to grow your business will fall under any of these three categories.

In the first case, to grow your business and increase profits, you will need to go out and look for more customers. This you do by advertising, direct selling, social media engagement, etc.

In the second instance, you will need to get your customers to increase the amount they spend with you at the point of purchase, either by up-selling – offering them a much better version of what they want for a slightly higher price or down-selling – offering them an additional product for some extra pay.

In the third, you are simply making your customers to not only buy from you one time, but to buy from you on a periodic basis, again and again, day after day, week after week or month after month as the case may be.
Now out of these three, which one of them do you think is the easiest to implement?

Guess.

If I predict correctly, you chose Number One right?

We’ll you’re wrong.

The easiest to implement is actually Number Three and I will explain.
The hardest sale in business is the first sale, convincing someone to buy something from you for the first time. This is because you are an unknown risk. They aren’t sure whether your product will do what it says it will do. So you asking them to buy anything is asking them to make a leap of faith. To take a risk and spend money with your business.

If you do this correctly AND your product/service meets their expectation, better still if it surpasses their expectation then they will transfer their trust to you and your business. They will have faith in your ability to deliver a pleasant experience and results, and the next time out they will buy from you again.

Once you have gained someone’s trust like this, it’s FAR EASIER selling to them a second time. Because second time around you are not trying to convince them of your ability to deliver good results, they already know you can deliver and they will remember the good experience they had with you last time out.

Secondly, you really do not need incur any advertising expenses in selling to them a second time and other times in the future, especially if you follow the formular I will teach you further below.

Now in a perfect world, these things would happen seamlessly, with you hardly raising a finger. But we of course do not live in a perfect world. The fact that someone buys something from you the first time and is very pleased with their purchase does not guarantee that they will buy from you again.

This is because we are talking about human beings here. They are bombarded with promotional messages from different businesses ‘seducing’ them, wooing them to make their next purchase with them instead of you.

They have other commitments that will make them forget or even find buying from you the next time an inconvenience – distance, mode of payment, ease of delivery, e.t.c.

They could have a similar business as yours make them a better offer than you did the last time.

And guess what it does not matter how you have pleased them, humans will always gravitate towards what they think is a better deal, a better offer. It’s an inborn trait in all of us, so this is not a bad thing.

So how do you make sure you get people who buy from your business to keep buying again and again and again?

Here’s how:

You use the most direct and cost effective form of marketing available today for businesses…

Email Marketing
What is email marketing?
It’s simple marketing using email.

If you have been online for any length of time, I’m sure you have received advertising messages in your email from several businesses asking you to buy something from them.

Big and small businesses from Microsoft to Jumia, down to my modest publishing company do it.

In our own business, we do it on a daily basis.

Email is cheap. It is direct and it costs almost nothing to send it out. And it shows up on the phones of your customers who can easily open and read them on their smartphones.

There’s Only One Snag With Email Marketing

It can be abused very easily.

You see many Nigerian business owners have no clue how to do email marketing.

What they do is they harvest email addresses using the same tactics “Yahoo Yahoo” boys use and them spam the heck out of people promoting their newest mall or their last gizmo.

And when this happens, the recipients get upset. I know I get upset when I get unsolicited email from a business, whether I am familiar with that business or not.

When this happens I mark the message as SPAM so that I never have to deal with it again, then I make a mental note to NEVER buy anything from that business ever.

And I am in the majority, because people hate being sent spam. When you send SPAM, you are hurting your business, not helping it. You are breeding resentment for your brand.

So How Do You Implement Email Marketing The Right Way?

Here’s how.

You need two things.
1. The willingness to write emails on a consistent basis – daily, weekly, or monthly. (You can outsource this if you don’t want to do it yourself)

2. An automated email sending service otherwise known as an email auto-responder.

For email marketing to work, you have to do it on a consistent basis. You cannot do it “when you feel like it”. This is because people need order and structure and when you have a schedule they will follow it and can accurately predict when to expect your emails.

Next you have to use an automated email sending (autoresponder) service.

You see it’s pretty hard, almost impossible to send out emails to large numbers of people manually. So an automation tool is required. And what legitimate businesses who do not want to SPAM do is instead of using harvesters, they use proper automation tools that are APPROVED by email hosts such as Yahoo, Gmail, Microsoft etc.

These tools are known as autoresponders and they are permission based. This means that they allow you to ask people to allow YOU to send THEM emails.
So people subscribe by themselves to be put into your email list/database.

In effect, this means you are not harvesting emails, your prospects and customers CHOOSE to receive emails from YOU and YOUR business.
Email autoresponders allow you to:

1. Send thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of emails all at once, without the need to get worried that my email will be blocked by the email service providers

2. Program when your recipients get the messages you want them to receive. You can set time, date, frequency, e.t.c.
This means that if I want to send an email to my customers by 7:31 am on Saturday October 18, 2014, (and I have done this many times before), I can easily do so.

3. Allow you to address your email recipients by name!

This is the ultimate in marketing psychology. Let’s say your name is Adeola and you saw two emails in your inbox and one says:

“Have you seen this…?”

And the other says:

“Adeola, have you seen this…?”

Which one of them would you open first and read?

Your guess is as good as mine

4. Allow you to collect unlimited amounts of prospect data such as names, email address, phone number, physical addresses, age, etc.

With data you can do almost anything to tailor your marketing messages. This means that you are not restricted to just email. You can collect even physical addresses and send your prospects physical letters and phone numbers so you can send them SMS!

5. Automatically lets your recipients OPT-OUT of receiving your messages if they want to.

Auto-responders are permission based. It is devoid of spam and automatically give your recipients a way to stop receiving your emails if they choose to do so.

This ensures that your business remains clean and only those who truly love your business are in your database.
How Profitable Id Email Marketing To A Business?

This is where I make the case for using email because I suspect the reason you’re reading this is to learn how using them will benefit you.

Here’s how:

Let’s say you have 1,000 people who have subscribed to be on your email list (or email database) via your autoresponder service.

Now let’s also say you have a product you sell for N10,000 and you make a profit of N5,000 on. If you send emails on a consistent schedule to your email list of 1,000 prospects, and you get just 5% of 1000 to buy every month, this means that every month you are assured 50 sales.

50 x N5,000 profit = N250,000.

An email autoresponder service will charge you just $15 (N2,550) per month for 1000 prospects.

This means you clear a profit of N247,450.

Now let’s kick our optimism a notch higher.

Let’s assume this time you have 10,000 people on your email database.

Using the same figures as earlier, you sell to just 5% of them each month for a profit of N5,000. This means that you will make 500 sales.

500 x N5,000 profit is = N2,500,000!

For having 10,000 people in your database, an email autoresponder service will charge you just $65.

N11,050!

These are monies you DO NOT spend an advertising budget on to bring in month after month after month!

Of course as a smart person, you should still advertise to increase the number of people subscribing to your email list increasing the ability to sell to more people every single month!

Are you seeing the potential here?

Collecting email addresses of your prospects and customers is GOLD.

All you need to do is e-mail them on a consistent basis with offers to buy something.

Of course, every single email you send them shouldn’t tell them to buy something. If it does they will unsubscribe, but that is a topic for another day.

For now, close your eyes and dream about the figures we just played with there. And we are talking just 5% of people here. There’s still 95% of them who have bought from you that month and who will still want to buy something later.

Now please do not be a naysayer and say it will be almost impossible to get 10,000 million people on your email database. In my own business we have 30,000. And we have plans to grow it to 100,000 in 2015.

In a subsequent blog post I will show you how to build a massive amount of email subscribers for your business
For now let’s learn…

How To Implement Email Marketing In Any Business

Are you excited already? I bet you are right now. I want to show you how to implement an autoresponder into your business.
I will be using my friend V’s business as an example. V sells Adult Sex toys and we will explore here how she can implement an autoresponder into her business.

Here’s how:
Step One: She needs a bait to get people to subscribe.
People do not go online looking to subscribe to an email list or database. They go online looking for something that will interest them.

And people guard their email addresses and other personal data jealously.

Before they give any of their data to you, you must have something they like to receive in exchange and this something must be free, hence the reason I call it the “bait”.

This is similar to what a fisherman does when he goes fishing. He wants to catch fish, but the fish won’t come to him willingly. He has to put a worm on a hook and lower it into the water. When fish see the worm, they get attracted to it, they open their mouth to eat it and the hook catches them and the fisherman pulls it in.
Same thing here.

V needs to have a bait she will give people in exchange for their email address.
Since she sell physical products, sex toys, etc, she can possibly use a physical product as bait since it nes to be free and a physical product requires shipping and it’ll cost. So my recommendation is that she gives out a book instead, an e-book.

There’s a reason why people buy sex toys, and it’s mostly because they have sexual problems. I know because my company publishes and sells books on sexual health targeted at men and we have sold thousands of copies.

So using a book that explains something about the problems her prospects face is a good bait.

Step Two: She needs to out the bait on a separate stand-alone page on her website

Now that she has a bait, the next thing is she needs to have it put on a separate page on her website. The only thing on this page should be…

• A benefit-laden headline telling visitors on that page why they need to subscribe to get the bait

• the cover of the book she’s using as bait,

• the autoresponder OPT-IN subscription form (she’ll get this from the autoresponder service when she signs up)
and
• links to the “privacy policy”, “terms of use” and “contact us” pages of her website so that she can be in good compliance with the autoresponder service provider.

So once
Step Three: Every marketing she does should direct people to this page ONLY

This includes all social media promotion, all advertising done via Facebook, Google, Ad Dynamo, Yahoo Ad Network, newspapers, radio, TV ads etc.

All advertising is highlighted to promote the “give away bait” and to direct people to the page where they will get it.
Once they have subscribed, they can now be redirected automatically (this is also handled by the autoresponder) to any page of her website she likes.

By the time, they are already in her email list and the email list is growing in leaps and bounds!
Now she can email everybody on that email list from the day they subscribe until the day they either opt-out or stop living, WITHOUT spending any more money advertising to them!

Here’s an example of a landing page (still under construction) by one of my young mentees who is planning to start selling his weight loss book.

http://www.healthandfitnessnigeria.com/join.htm
Step Four: She needs to take care of her email list

Your email list is like a POT OF GOLD. Because it contains the data of people who will give you month in months and years to come. It is not something to be joked with.

If you had a pot of gold, one that you can dip your hand in and draw money from every time, would you treat it carelessly?
Of course not. You would treat it carefully. And take care of it. Here’s how V, and any other business person for that matter must take care of their email list.

1. She must NOT make the main thrust of every email she sends out to be about buying something.
People hate being bombarded with emails that only scream “Buy! Buy!! Buy!!!” If you send such emails only, they will OPT OUT and unsubscribe.

Of course there’s a way to still promote subtly within each email.

2. She must NOT promote something with the sole goal of making money.

When you send promotional emails to your prospects, you must make sure that what you are sending is what a lot of people in your database want to buy. Business is a two-way street and your product or service must as much benefit your customer as much as their money will benefit you.

This is NON-NEGOTIABLE.

3. She must NOT Do not do joint ventures with people or businesses she do not have a 100% assurance that their business ethics is proper.

A fall out of having a large email database is that many businesses will start soliciting you to promote their business to your subscribers so they will pay you percentage of total sales as commission.

We get this at my company on a weekly basis.
It’s really tempting to accept because all you need to make money is compose an email and click “send”, but before you do this be very wary.

Do NOT promote any product that comes your way. Make sure it aligns with your prospects interests, goals and what they want. Do not ever promote something you suspect they will not like. If you do, and they don’t you burn the trust they have in you and many of them will unsubscribe.

How to know what your customers want?

Ask them. The autoresponder services come bundled with survey tools which you can use to ask your prospects to tell you what theirs desires are and they things they would like to purchase. The service we use which has this survey feature and much more is GetResponse (www.getresponse.com)

Do not also promote products by people you do not know. It doesn’t matter if they want to give you a 100% commission on sales. Don’t do it. Because if your trust with your prospects burn, you will be the loser not them. They will simply walk away ad find another email list owner to partner with.

Of course there’s a lot more to talk about but I’ll stop here as this post is getting too long. I will share more in subsequently posts.

I hope I have taught you a lot so far.

Implement this and you will see your business soar to heights you previously thought impossible.
Have a great week and thank you for reading.
My name is Ronald Nzimora.

—————

Ronald Nzimora runs Profits Marketing Systems Limited, an online marketing communications and publishing firm. He’s also invested in two more.He tweets from @ronaldnzimora

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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