Tag Archives for " webinars "
Email marketing advice 101 at the moment seems to be ‘write a daily email’. Many people seem to have taken this advice at face value.
Writing a daily email is good advice, under the right circumstances. If your message is valuable enough there will be people who want to hear from you every day. Maybe multiple times per day, if you have the time.
The problem is that thinking of interesting things to write every day can be terrifying. 9AM becomes 10AM. 10AM becomes… 4PM. In a panic you end up writing about the goofy thing your dog did this morning, or what you had for breakfast.
Nobody cares about these things except you.
The danger is we end up communicating for the sake of communicating. The world is already full of marketing people trying to make noise. If you want to write daily emails you should do so as a strategy, not a tactic.
In this month’s Confusion Clinic webinar we’re looking at story selection: how to select what to write about in your marketing emails.
Story selection is the only part of the email production process that comes close to being a ‘dark art’. We’ll explore how to select stories your customers actually want to hear.
Time: 6-7PM UK, 1-2PM US Eastern
Date: Wednesday 27th July
Register for the webinar here
No charge to attend live, and a recording will be available for 48 hours after the call. After that it will only be available to Introvert’s Corner members.
We’ll have time for QnA. If you’re a writer I strongly recommend making time to be on the call.
Two and a half thousand years ago the Chinese philosopher Confucius is rumoured to have said:
If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.
The salient point is the way you define what you do ultimately determines what you do. A few years ago I remember asking two educated marketing colleagues to define marketing for me. These were people I respected with degrees in marketing.
“Well, it’s sort of everything, isn’t it?” was the best response they managed.
If you define marketing as everything you will end up doing everything (Snapchat, anyone?) with no clear image of the objectives.
Personally I like Peter Drucker’s definition: marketing is everything to do with making and keeping a customer. Many companies forget about the second part because they define themselves by what they do, and what they do is often a one-time sale.
I have a number of friends getting married at the moment. I am constantly amazed at the stupidity of wedding dress shops who avoid continuing a relationship with people they sold a dress to for thousands and thousands of pounds.
They don’t continue the customer relationship because they have not correctly defined what it is they do.
“But we’re a dress shop!” they say.
“No you’re not!” I say.
I’m running a webinar this Wednesday on the full marketing nurture process, as I see it. The first thing we’ll do is nail down the definitions on what we are doing.
If you still think definitions are unimportant then by all means don’t attend.
Apparently, shock of shocks, Google and Microsoft are changing the rules.
If you use an email service provider (like Infusionsoft or Mailchimp) to send emails and set your sender name as a @gmail, @hotmail, @yahoo, @aol, @outlook, @live, or @msn domain your emails are no longer going to get through.
If you have a serious business I don’t know why you would set your sender name as any of these things, but apparently people do.
Reading between the lines I think there is an important trend going on. People in general use Gmail, Outlook or some equivalent system to read emails. These systems are increasingly focusing on relevancy, not recency.
How recently you received an email is less important to these email systems than the historical interaction you have with the sender.
If you have a good track record of opening emails from a particular sender and even replying to the occasional email, Google will flag emails from that person as important.
If Google think you’re a scumbag they’ll relegate your emails to the promotions tab. You don’t want to be showing up under the promotions tab. You want to be showing up under the inbox tab, with a yellow ‘important’ shield next to your name.
A lot of what I do falls under the category of marketing nurture. Marketing nurture means taking cold enquiries and generating sales. To achieve that you need interaction. You need to be showing up in the inbox. You need high open and engagement rates.
The problem is the whole nurture model has been a little… vague. A contact opts in. We ‘nurture’ them for an indeterminate period of time. Eventually they see the light and pull out their credit card.
I’m running a webinar next week talking about a marketing nurture model I have been working on. If you are fed up of endless nurturing and want to generate sales you should listen in. We’ll be breaking the marketing nurture process down into specific actionable steps that generate revenue.
Join us to learn:
Wednesday 29th June, 6-7PM UK, 1PM US Eastern.
There is no charge to attend live. A recording will be available for 48 hours after the call.
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