Every time you email your customer list, you have three objectives besides generating a sale:
- To entertain
- To educate
- To upgrade someone’s level of understanding about your subject
When you do these three things, each email builds value into your list, rather than extracts value out.
Upgrading someone’s level of thinking about what you do has the biggest business impact impact of the three, but is the hardest to do. You can only upgrade someone’s thinking once you’ve first entertained them, and second educated them.
Most marketing emails focus exclusively on education, or exclusively on nagging. Sending repeated naggy sales emails might provide a short term uplift in revenue, but it doesn’t create a healthy long term prospect database.
We all need to generate sales. But make sure you’re building more value into your list than you extract.