The Social Marketer’s Guide to ‘Hot Leads’ – Email Lists – The Buzz

Let’s paint a picture:

You use Social Media for marketing
Don’t have a website
Social Media goes down and you lose all your content and contacts
Social Media evolves where it becomes chargeable
You’re put into Social Media ‘jail’ and locked out of your account for 2 weeks
You broke a Social Media policy rule and they close your account forever

Where would your business be then?

An Email List is the life line to your business. Its importance cannot be underestimated.

What are the benefits to an email list?

PROMOTION

Nothing is better than Social Media to get engagement. However, if someone gives you their email address you have a qualified buyer. They are yours.

However, if you read the policies on Facebook about posting you may be surprised to find out that your content is “yours”, but guess who owns it? They do… Are you shocked yet?

PROTECTION

Google and Facebook change their algorithms an unbelievably huge amount of times a year. We don’t know when they do this or how often. Because of this your posts can sometimes be penalised and you have no idea what you have done wrong.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you can’t find your post? You think it has disappeared. The change in the algorithms has changed the order of posts therefore you can disappear.

When you have a list of qualified buyers and prospects, you are protected by your list.

Let’s say your search rankings disappeared totally right now and you couldn’t be found online, your email list would be your saviour.

It will take time, however start creating a list of ‘hot’ leads now.

These leads are always far more opened to your message. Existing customers are always easier to work with, rather than trying to find new business constantly.

Hence why your email list is GOLD! You own it.

If you want to grow your business, grow your email list. Nothing beats a list of qualified buyers.

If you’re marketing your product or service online it would be a great idea to implement an ‘opt-in’ email strategy, otherwise you may as well be working your business blind-folded. An email list can take you from an ‘unknown’ to a large business just through ‘email marketing’.

When you have an email address, it means you can market to this as often as possible until your audience decides to ‘opt-out’.

These emails become your ‘data base’.

Consider what you could do with this list? You create one email, send that to your entire list (which could be hundreds over time) on just about anything. IE:

Product Promotion
Product information IE benefits and results
Sales/Specials
End of line stock
Webinars/Training
Stories of Value
Blogs/Vlogs
Interviews with other Leaders
Tutorials
Podcasts
Newsletters and Newsworthy Articles
Events
And best of all, a combination of the above

And the list goes on.

It’s low in cost to reach an already engaged audience with your targeted message.

It will drive sales, is measurable and shareable, you get instant impact and the return on your investment is unrivalled.

You see, the more touch points and valuable content you send to your email list, the more trust and credibility you build around you, your subject and business.

These touch points DO NOT have to be product or service driven. In fact, you are far better off touching base with VALUABLE content, asking nothing in return. Ask yourself, ‘how do I feel when I get something for nothing?’

A suggestion would be to send something out weekly. For example:
Blog and/or video – say an interview with someone
Promotion of your product or service
Interesting article you found that supports one of our products
Newsletter with a ‘how to’ video
REPEAT

Like everything to do with business, your website is your hub. This is where all your intellectual property is housed.

Again… it’s your PROTECTION. I would encourage everyone, if you don’t have a website, to put that on the horizon.

Email collection is great from your website!

Sure, emails can be collected from events you may hold or be a guest speaker at, you can just ask when chatting with people or signup forms to release a give-away off your website.

Your customer emails are found in your back office of Shifting Retail. Download these and then upload them into your own email platform.

Mailchimp (www.mailchimp.com) would be the easiest one to start with as a small business and is an ‘all in one marketing platform’.

It helps you create emails, ads and share messages with your audience. These messages are called campaigns. Mailchimp gives you the tools to design and send your message.

A campaign is any distributed content and best of all it can be measured. So, you’ll know what works and what doesn’t. You can design, customise, send 1 email or a series of emails.

As an example, you can send 1 email, then follow it up the next week with 3 (what they call) auto-responders. These auto-responders can be scheduled to go automatically, so you don’t have to be in front of your computer to do this.

Mailchimp can, not only create emails, but ads, landing pages, postcards and social posts along with integrating your Social Media Ads. Adding your promo-code into a postcard is an example.

Here’s a thought! Send a simple Thank You card to your customers for their last purchase. Or, send them a birthday card. If you don’t have their birthdates – you can get that out of Facebook.

It’s all about the touch points. How many times do you touch base with your prospects and customers?

The more they see your name, the more you touch base with them, the more VALUABLE content you give away for FREE, the more they will come to KNOW, LIKE AND TRUST YOU.

All of this helps with PROMOTION and PROTECTION of YOU. This is forms part of your prospecting.

Mailchimp allows you to segment and target your contacts based on a variety of criteria. For an example…

You may have customers that only buy Shape. You can segment your list for those people only.

Then you can create a campaign for that list alone and upsell them to our Liquid Bio-Cell by sharing what the benefits are, especially with the combination of the 2 products. This is a great way to upsell and close on a bundled product sale.

They have a heap of instructional videos, but don’t forget our friend Google and You Tube. You’ll find heaps of instructional videos there as well. By the way, if you are stuck with anything such as terminology or jargon – google it! Use it like you would your dictionary.

My suggestion would be to, not only work with your customer list, however build your prospect list. You want to find new emails to add to your list constantly.

In business we have, what is called, natural attrition, meaning customers drop off over time. It’s these that we want to constantly replace and grow.

Currently, Modere has many touch points with your customers. However, how many touch points do you have with your customers? By you touching base personally you are adding to YOUR visibility and credibility? The more touch points YOU have, the more YOU build your personal brand and loyalty.

So, how can we collect new emails?

Host regular webinars
Just ask
Hold face to face events like Meetups
Create a course that you give away for free
Create an ebook that you give away for free
Call to Action button on your Facebook business page https://www.facebook.com/help/977869848936797
Interaction on Forums
Comments on blogs

Here’s this weeks’ hack: https://www.plrassassin.com/

Writing ebooks is a lot of fun, however for many of us it can be a little bit overwhelming.

Plrassassin has a free and paid version and it offers ebooks which you can download and give away. Guess what you can include in one of your email blasts? Even monthly if you wanted to.

There are so many ebooks to choose from, literally pages and pages of books. Best of all there are heaps of different topics to select.

Once you have selected the book, please read the licensing info on that book. It will give you the ‘do’s and don’ts’ for re-publishing.

We all fun global businesses and be proud of that. A short time ago, your network would only have been local, but social media has given us the opportunity to be visible around the world.

It’s here where I say, the EU has rules around the collection of emails and personal information. It’s called the GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect 2018. Here is the official site:

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/priorities/justice-and-fundamental-rights/data-protection/2018-reform-eu-data-protection-rules_en

However, to give you a brief overview here’s a short video.