You absolutely need your own email list to grow your business! And I’m going to tell you the whys and how you can use this opportunity to scale your business to unimagined heights.
I’ve spoken to a number of small business owners over the past months. Many of them don’t have their own email lists or think it’s not important to have one. Especially if their business are depending heavily on referrals.
I was concerned about this matter as I believe this is a short term strategy. So I’ve dedicated an entire post to explain the crux of having an email list.
In the previous posts, I’ve focused very much on why having a quiz could be the engine in getting more leads and how a great quiz can help you to segment and qualify your leads.
1. Do you want control of your own business?
Who doesn’t??? Relying on word of mouth always translates into higher likelihood of purchase and this has been the way of most small businesses in the past.
If customers like you and your products, they will promote to their friends and family. If your customers are happy (:-)) at the end of your services or after they have bought your products, you will get clients.
Right? Very straightforward.
Wrong.
There are two assumptions you have made.
- The friends and family of your customers are having the same problems.
- Your customers have a huge influence on the decision making process of their friends and family.
Sometimes it so happens – not everyone surrounding your customers face the same problems. In this case, there are no causes for a recommendation in the first place.
Even if they are facing a similar problem, unless it’s very critical and requires urgent attention, they might not be looking for the service immediately. It’s a timing issue in this case.
Let’s say, the timing issue is resolved and the family and friends are indeed looking for a solution. Will the particular customer have a huge influence in the decision making process? Will his or her family and friends be convinced?
In the past, this might work. However, these days, the internet is easily accessible and consumers can easily go online anytime to research on solutions.
Word of mouth is of a lesser influence. Unless the customer (you are relying on) has a huge role in the lives of their friends and family and is perceived as an expert.
All these points to circumstances you can’t control in your business.
Reaching out to new people to build your own email list means you are building up your own list of leads.
Rather than just waiting for a potential client to show you, you get behind the steering wheel and drive your own business.
2. Having your own email list is like the “little black book”
Before the internet times, business owners used to keep a little black book of contacts. The contacts comprises of prospects, leads and existing customers.
Of course in those times, there was no organization of these categories in the book. One had to either remember the leads who are ready to become customers in the head or write it down in a note-book somewhere.
Today, we have these email software to store these information. We tag them in the categories they are in and even previous products or services they have bought from us.
Even the communication method has switched from calling those customers on the landline to contact via mobile through a call or text or even just email addresses.
However, going down to the basics of running a business, you need to keep your own email list if you are seriously planning to grow your business.
You want the ability to tell your prospects, leads and existing customers – when you are running a promotion, when you have new product launches or if you decide to run a product trial or create brand awareness.
3. You are just serving local clients. Why do you need one??
If you don’t have their email addresses, how do you inform all of them in time when you have a new product launch, an upcoming promotion or a special event next month?
Do you want to rely on the posters at your shop window if and when they walk past your shop-front?
Or do you prefer to spend time calling up each one of them individually?
Of course if you have their numbers, you can send them a boring text message.
“We have an exciting anniversary event coming up at the end of the month. We’ll have a live band and a special 10% off discount for the entire day! Come join us! “
Studies show our brains not only process visuals 60,000x faster than text, but they retain and transmit much more information when it’s delivered visually.
Today, it’s easy for information to get lost or ignored if it’s not in a digestible format. Communication is useless unless your audience remembers you.
Integrating visual content can boost how much your audience absorbs and remembers.
If a message is released to the public but no one can recall it, did it really happen?
Visualize this – if you have their email addresses, you can send them a digital poster! One with colour visuals and messaging that they can see clearly and get truly excited about!
Or you can even create a video and send them in the email a link – so you can personalize your message with your voice and get your local clients all pumped up for the event!
Getting email addresses truly creates more engaging possibilities with your local client base!
4. Your Marketing Budget Is Limited
If that’s the case, all the more essential you have your own list! Each time you have something special for your existing customers or prospects, you just blast out to them in an email (costing peanuts!) rather than spend money on an outreach campaign or on advertising!
61% of people check their phone 5 minutes after waking up.
I’m part of the statistics. I check out my social media notifications, email notifications and the messaging apps.
So imagine, if you send an email to the inbox of your potential client, what are the chances of them seeing it?
Very high.
5. Do you want to build your content on rented land?
Google changes its algorithm 500-600 times every year – big and small.
Occasionally, Google might slap you with a traffic penalty. And you have zero awareness what you’ve done wrongly.
Traffic from Google dips suddenly. Sounds scary?
Insure yourself against those external changes – get your own email list!
Even if all of my search rankings goes to naught tomorrow, I’d still be able to promote my product and services to at least thousands of people via email!
Similarly, social media platforms gets frequent updates and algorithm changes. Just last year alone, 8 changes have been rolled out on Facebook in the first five months. It’s awesome to get engagement through those channels but nothing gets engagement like email.
End of 2017, Facebook announced changes in their algorithm – prioritizing posts from friends and family.
This naturally leads to a drop in organic reach for businesses and brands. Setting aside a paid advertising budget sounds like the obvious going forward. The other alternative is to focus on posting video content.
Either way, it’s fairly obvious – platforms not owned by yourself are potentially subjected to changes. Any time.
Quit relying on external channels and stop letting external influences hold you back from achieving your goals and objectives.
Once your audience has arrived through those channels, get their email addresses and convert them into your subscribers.
6. Lifespan of your emails are much longer
When you compare social media posts to your email, the lifespan of your message is much longer. Fact is, an email message is 5x more likely to be seen than a Facebook message.
Your email will sit in the intended Inbox as “unread” until it’s acknowledged. The lifespan of your email is decided by your recipient.
That’s the reason you are still getting clicks even several days or even weeks after sending the campaign. It’s more likely your recipients will get the chance to read it.
On the other hand, the lifespan of a social media post can range between a few hours to only minutes or maximum one week.
7. Email ROI Is $44 To Every Dollar Spent (£38 to every pound spent)
Stats have shown, the returns from selling to your own email list is very high! Once you have your email list, your marketing budget is a one-time for getting their email address. In other words, each time you engage with those subscribers, you are increasing the likelihood of a purchase!
Email also offers the chance to build a consistent and valuable relationship because you are in control of the list and is in the position to manage the engagement frequency.
With improvement in technology, you can now easily attach videos, GIFs and images, making this communication channel more interactive and fun!
8. Email Marketing Offers Multiple Touchpoint Opportunities
Look at ecommerce sites like Amazon. How do they get you to continually buy more products from them?
By emailing you offers on a regular basis.
If you aren’t selling anything yet, you should still collect emails so you can get people excited and keep returning to your site on a continual basis. For instance, if you have a blog, every time you publish a new content piece, you can notify your list, that will help increase repeat traffic.
Or if you can send out some tips on how to maximize usage of your products. Email marketing offers conversation opportunities – that is the best channel to build trust over time.
Trust is the currency of relationships – and sending advice or tips to your email list will boost your chances to earn more trust over time.
Email marketing is still highly regarded as one of the most valuable and targeted channels to talk and communicate with your audience.
Which goes on to the next question, so which software should I go for to start collecting those email addresses for my own email list?
Email Software Recommendations
If You Are A Complete Beginner
Those who have just started out on the business and are on a very low budget, start with MailChimp. It’s free for up to 2,000 subscribers per month.
If you are a total beginner and don’t have a huge range of products and services, MailChimp has an easy to use interface and offers simple email automations. This should minimize your learning curve and don’t eat up your marketing budget.
Beginner to email marketing but have a huge customer base
I would advise you to go for Drip. Drip is a relatively newcomer to the email marketing landscape and their rates are much more competitive than ConvertKit and Active Campaign.
It’s $41 per month and has sophisticated email automations and integrations
Offers a range of services ranging from low to high end & plans for a membership site
Go for ClickFunnels. It’s obvious you know email marketing is important. You have varying price point offerings for your clients. You are very established and you’re interested to scale your business up.
ClickFunnels is a tool that helps to market, sell and deliver your products online. You can build complex email autoresponders, upsell or downsell to customers with just a click.
Those who have been sitting on the fence about owning your own email list or underestimated the power of one, I hope you are completely with me on the same page.
Your next step after this : sign up for one of those email marketing software (if you haven’t done so already) – and get cracking on growing your own email list!
Good luck to your business!
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