Episode 14: Breakthrough Marketing Ideas – Email Marketing

Hey this Alex Branning, your marketing coach. Thank you so much for listening to my podcast, I appreciate you so much, I love seeing all of the people that are enjoying the content, and I love hearing your success stories. Today I want to talk to you about my second breakthrough marketing idea and that is email marketing. I’m going to break it down for you step by step, give you ideas on how to take action on this and show you why it is vital to your business.

Okay, so I want to get started by overcoming some ideas that we have in our mind about email marketing that I hear a lot. When I bring it up to people they tell me, “I don’t want to spam people.” Well good, I don’t want you to spam people either, so let’s get that out of the way. Spam is bad, alright. Another thing that I hear is people don’t open their email. That’s not necessarily true, numbers aren’t great, but I’m going to show over the next few moments here why the numbers of your open rate should not deter you from using email marketing. The other thing that I hear is, “Alex, I just don’t know what to send people on a regular basis” and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re solving all the problems today for email marketing.

When it comes to email marketing, there’s a mindset, there’s a shift that needs to happen. I want you to look at your lead generation that’s happening now. If you’re not building your list, look at all the leads that are coming in. Every single month you have to start from zero essentially, working on getting leads. Because you don’t have anything in the pipeline right now. Who do you reach out to when you want to set up a phone call or try to set up a sales presentation or ask for referral? How do you do that? It’s difficult, unless you have a way to get your message out in mass, and that’s what email marketing is all about. The cool thing about building your list is that when you have somebody on your list they are now on your database for life. Just think about that, think about the power in that.

I remember a couple of years ago, when Eric Lofholm was first talking to me about building your list, and I started researching it and just started looking at different opportunities that were out there for somebody like me, in the marketing space to build a list. My list was at zero, and now my list is just over 8,000. That means that If I’m having a down month, I can write a quick email and say, “Hey, I’d love to help you out, I’d love to jump on a free strategy call with you and here how I can help you.” Or I can make a specific offer to my list, and I can send out an offer or an item of value, and it goes out to 8,000 people at the click of a button. That’s cool.

Now if you’re listening to this and going, “Alex, I’m not going to get a list of 8,000, that’s not my market, that’s not what I do.” That’s fine. Imagine if your list is 25 people, or a hundred, or 200. How different, how big of a difference would it make in your business if just by writing a simple email you could tap it and boom, you’re now communicating with 25, or 50, or a hundred people all at once. It’s powerful, right? It’s a breakthrough marketing idea. There are so many opportunities that are right in front of us, that we just don’t think about, we don’t know how to take action on them. Email marketing is one of those things that I talk about to potential clients, and I mention it a lot, but they just don’t know how to take action on it. That’s okay. You know what, this is what this podcast is for, I want to give you ideas on how to actually take action on your list.

If you’re listening to this, I’m going to assume that you’re at ground zero. Now you may be listening to this and being, “Alex, I have a list.”, but you are probably not monetizing it or using it to its full capacity. You’re not using it to a level 10, which we talk about in my Level 10 Marketing Coaching Program. You’re not executing it at a high level, so here’s what I want you to do. I want you to, as you’re thinking about this right now, I want you to write a goal. How many people do you want on your list? Now, for the next 90 days, how many people do you want to add to your list? Now, if you do not have a list, I’m going to drop some resources on my podcast episode page, I recommend AWeber. If you are just going for a straight email program I recommend ClickFunnels, because that’s what I use, and I love it and it’s just a great tool. I did not get on this podcast to sell ClickFunnels, but I believe that if you are going to be generating leads, trying to sell them, you creating offers and marketing them on a regular basis you need to have a strong tech foundation, and ClickFunnels is, in my opinion, the best option out there.

Anyways, you need to pick a goal, because we need to have a goal that way we can judge if what we’re doing is working. For me, when I first started, I’ll give an idea from me when I first started, I said, “In the next 90 days I want to add one person a day to my list. One person a day.” Now pick a niche. Now you probably already have that. I’m going to assume that you do, so write that down. Now you go find your audience. Now where is your audience? For me, when I first started, my audience was specifically small business owners in the town of Lancaster in Palmdale, California, because that’s where I lived for about 25 years. I wanted to build my list full of local, small business owners. I was able to do that. That was my one goal, I wanted to add one person a day to my list, so that was one big thing, and I went after it and I was able to do it and it was great.

And then what, right? Now how do you monetize it? What do you send to these people? I’m going to give you a couple of ideas. The first one is you always start with value. Look, I don’t care what market you’re in, what industry you’re in, it doesn’t really matter, you have things that your audience wants to know. For me, people want to know about marketing, they want to know about what’s going on, what the new changes are in Facebook and YouTube, et cetera. They’re very interested, they want me to tell them what’s going on. For you, your audience wants to know what’s going on in your world. Now, I was talking with somebody the other, he said, “Solar needs, man there’s only so many things that I can talk about related to solar.” That’s true, and so we had to get creative. For him we talked about solar, we talked about the referral program, we talked about what’s inside of a panel, we talked about batteries, Elon Musk. The emails that we send out on a regular basis, they’re all fun, they’re all quick reads, and it’s all about engaging your audience.

People do not want to be sold, but they do want to learn about what it is that you do, they want to walk away with a little bit more knowledge about the topic, so that they feel good about themselves. It’s important for you that you are putting yourself in a position to be the expert on your audiences’ mind when it comes to what it is that you do. You want to make sure that you have a goal for how many people you want to add to your list. You want to have a content plan. Now a content plan could be every two weeks I’m going to send out an email sharing one tip related to your industry, depending on what it is, or one news item related to your industry. Then, with every email that you send, give them a call to action. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see in email marketing. I don’t know how many of you get email newsletters from real estate agents and such, but a lot of newsletters are just here, “Here’s the latest news. Here’s the latest market report, here’s a new listing that I have.” How do I respond to it, they’re not guiding me on how they want me to respond to it.

Make sure that you’re very clear on how you want our audience to respond to the emails that you send. Maybe it’s clicking a link, maybe it’s replying to the email, maybe it’s sending you a text message. Be very clear on what you want them to do now that they have this knowledge, if they want to take more action with you. The other thing is you want to monetize your list. This is where there’s a lot of mental blocks in our mind. You’ve been there before, you are on the call and now it’s the time to make the offer, and you kind of freeze up a little bit. I want to make this easy for you. Number one, in your email you’re not trying to close the deal, you just want them to take the next step in the deal. If you’re a real estate agent that means sitting down and having coffee with you, or giving them the information for a home market value report. If you’re an insurance agent it’s about trying to renew their existing policy. If you’re a solar sales person coming over to the house, for me as a marketer it’s jumping on a strategy call, that’s the next step.

Now, we want to make it super easy for them, so that they can schedule that. We also want to give them a reason why they should do that. For me, when I set up my strategy calls, let’s say that you’re going to walk out of the call with at least three different marketing ideas, for the solar sales person one of the things that I helped him with is you’re going to have a full and complete understanding of what solar could do for your budget, your home, and why you should consider going solar. You’ll have all the information to make an informed decision. Sometimes that’s all people want, they just want to have all the information so that they can make an informed decision.

Now, but how do you monetize your list? It’s about sending the appointment for your own stuff, so getting to that next step in your own product or service. It could be introducing people to affiliate offers that make sense. For example, for me in the marketing space there’s a lot of tools that I could refer to my clients. There’s also a lot of things that quite honestly I know that they need, but I don’t provide them. For example, I could share with them the latest course, or the latest webinar that Eric Lofholm is putting on. I could share it to my email list, I could share a book that I’ve read and give them the Amazon affiliate link. I know that my list is full of business owners, and I know that I cannot meet the needs of all the business owners that are there, I don’t even want to, I just want to help out with a couple of marketing tasks. But I know that they need help and they need support, and I want to be there for them. I want them to see my emails as a resource, and so sometimes it’s about talking about other products or services that I’m not providing. You have the same thing. Once you are very clear on identifying who your niche is you will know how you can support them.

Sometimes it’s other people’s stuff that you want to send to them, and you want to put yourself in a position to make a little bit of money, so make sure that you have an affiliate link set up for either the book that you’re sending out or what have you. Make sure that you’re making a little bit of money off of it. One other thing that you can do to monetize your list is for those of you who have an informational product or a book, you can make an offer right there on the spot and let them know, “Hey, I’m selling this course, I’m selling this product, I have this deal going on right now and, and it’s just to the people on my email list, and so you’re one of them. Here’s a link on how you can move forward.” Sometimes those sorts of offers are good. Now you don’t want to do it all the time, I only do about once a quarter personally, because I don’t want to people to look at my list and think that I’m spamming them on a regular basis. It’s important to take opportunities to monetize your list.

Look, I said it before, let me say it again, I want it to really sink into your unconscious mind, your audience does not want to be sold, but they do want to learn about what you do, and they want to learn how they can support you. Use your email list as a way to do that. Now let’s talk about a couple of different breakthrough marketing terms that I’m using. One of them is multiplier, and email marketing is a great multiplier of your time. Check this out. I will sit down, and I will write out my email. For me, writing out the email takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. I will click send and now 8,000 people will get that email. Now it won’t be read by all of them, it’ll be read by … On average, it’s about 400 people will open the email, based on the stats that I see, that’s about five percent of my list. It’s not bad, it’s not great, but it’s not bad. Of the people that open it, depending on what my offer is, half will click on the link to take the next step.

By me sending out an email to my list every time I get about 250 people that take action, which is really cool. For you, whether even if you have just a list of 25 people you are now talking, you are now sending a very clear-cut message to 25 people that are on your list, and you’re telling them how to take the next step. Now it could be setting up an appointment with you, it could be a link to an Amazon book, whatever that is, whatever that looks like, they are taking the next step, and you are multiplying your time. You are putting things in motion with 25 people on your list. For me with 8,000 people on my list, they are getting put into motion with a lot of people all at once. It’s a great way to create momentum in your business. One of the other things that you can do, I want you to think about this as a maximizer, is you can create joint venture relationships or partner relationships, referral partner relationships with people that serve your same customers, so that you can send their people an offer for your stuff, and then in return you can send your list an offer for your referral partner stuff.

For example, there’s a lender that I work with, and the lender sent out an email for the solar sales person, and the solar sales person in return sent out an email for the lender. It was a great way for them to team up, they’re both serving home owners, they’re both serving the consumer market, where they are it was a great way for them to get more leads and strengthen their own relationship. It was really successful as well. Those are a way that you can maximize the use of your email list. You can use your email list to enhance really good, power partner relationships. One other thing that I talk about is my time cost per lead. It’s a big deal for me, we only have a certain number of hours in a day, we have to be very cautious on how we use them. Email marketing is a great way to really use your time wisely. Again, for me it’s about on average it’s about 30 minutes that I spend writing the emails out. I get about 200 to 250 people taking action every time I send an email. That’s a half hour to 200 actions, that’s insane how much is happening in my business for half hour of my time. It’s an incredible multiplier, it gives me a great time cost per lead. Email marketing has become a huge component of my growth.

I hope this inspired you to take action on your email. If you’re like, “Man, I need to get started on building my list,” I want to make you an offer. I actually put together an entire course where I talk about creating, growing, and monetizing your list. It’s called List Building 101. I have a great offer for you if you go to my website, alexbranning.com/episode14. You can grab my List Building 101 course. Normally, I’ve been selling it for $297, but for my podcast listeners right now it’s only $97, so go ahead and grab it. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. When you go to my website I will have links to AWeber and ClickFunnels, and links to List Building 101 and to my Level 10 course, I’d love to have you in there as well. Thank you so much, I look forward to hearing your success stories.

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