email marketing Archives | Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing, persistence and pests!

June 3, 2010 by Jim Connolly

Don’t you find it amazing that in 2010, people are still using the 1980’s sales and marketing model of pestering and pursuing people?

Here’s the problem with that approach: People hate being pestered and pursued.

For example, I received an email last week, whilst I was on holiday with my wife and 4 year old son. The email started with the line; “I know you are on holiday with your family but…” then he hit me with a sales pitch. He showed me zero respect and instantly alienated me. The same guy then emailed me again today with the same pitch and said he hoped I “respected his professional persistence.” There’s nothing professional about what he did. In fact, the message he gave me was; “Yes, I know you are on holiday but I really don’t give a shit about you – buy this now!”

Permission marketing & professional marketing

For over 2 decades, I have successfully used and advocated the use of, what some people today call permission marketing. Back then, we simply called it professional marketing.

Professional marketing is about treating the marketplace with respect.

It’s about operating with class.

It’s about building a strong, professional reputation.

It’s about building relationships.

It’s about trust.

It’s about professionally researching your marketplace.

It’s about considering the person behind the “sale” and not just thinking of everyone as a number.

It’s about engaging with people, who have a genuine, potential need for whatever you are offering and who have given you permission to market to them.

That’s how to build a very successful marketing function!

It’s ironic when you consider the example I gave earlier of a pushy marketer, but email marketing is one of my favourite forms of marketing. That’s because it lends itself beautifully to the professional marketing model. When used correctly, it can be super-effective and generate incredible results. Of course, very few people use email marketing correctly – choosing instead to buy lists or copy them from websites, and then pester people with unwanted sales pitches. They may get 1 person in 5,000 to place an order, but they will have just sent what felt like spam to the other 4,999!

A company using that approach for long enough, will actually make their prospective customer base smaller and smaller, with each unwanted email they send.

Have you been pestered by pursuit marketers? How does it make you feel about the people behind those tactics? Let us know!

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

More marketing pests: Your feedback please!

March 21, 2010 by Jim Connolly

Several times a week, I get email from people, who claim to enjoy reading this blog and want to know if they can be one of my guest bloggers. Clearly, they have never read the blog, as there is no guest blogging here. (The clue is in the blog’s name!)

Several times a day, I get email from people, telling me they enjoy reading my blog and would like me to link to them. Clearly, they have never visited the blog, or they would know there are no link-exchanges here. I link to a few sites, all of which are owned by people I know and trust. NONE of them asked for the link. BTW: I just added Danny Brown’s blog to my links (Get well soon Danny!)

In yesterday’s blog post, I wrote about the mindset that says it’s ok to piss-off 99.9% of people you contact, to reach that 0.1%, who may listen to or read your message. That post was about cold calls from unprofessional tele-marketers, but the same applies to other forms of impersonal, mass produced junk marketing too.

…and the best part?

The massive majority of email I receive, asking for links and postings, comes from marketing companies or SEO / SEM (search engine marketing) companies; on behalf of their clients and in their client’s name! It’s their client’s reputations that are being rendered toxic – and I’m willing to bet that in many cases, their clients don’t even know the damage being caused to their name or brand.

Get your marketing emails opened!

March 18, 2010 by Jim Connolly

This post is all about email marketing; specifically, how to get your email marketing opened!

The reason I am focusing on getting your marketing emails opened, is that no matter how great your marketing message or offer is, unless people actually open it and read it, it’s not going to generate the results you want.

How to get your emails opened

So, how do you quickly determine the best way to get your marketing emails opened? Simple: You keep copies of the marketing emails, which you have opened and you ask your contacts to do the same.

Then, you look at them and see what lessons you can apply to your own marketing!

Is this the best way to ensure your email’s get read? No! The best way is to hire a proven expert. Is this an effective way for a keen, small business owner to improve his or her email marketing results? Yep!

Email marketing clues

Once you have looked at the marketing emails that either you or your buddies have opened, you need to start looking for clues. By the way, it would be particularly useful, if you could get existing customers to let you know the kind of marketing emails THEY have opened, as they are the same profile of people that you want to target.

Here are just a few of the clues, which you may find when you examine those successful emails:

The email was sent to you, from someone you know and trust.
The email came from a person or company, which you remember subscribing to.
The subject line contained the correct spelling of your name.
The subject line contained the name of a person or business that you know personally or professionally.
The subject line contained a question that got you curious.
The subject line contained a bold statement, which grabbed your attention.

Many great marketing opportunities are missed by small businesses, simply because their emails never get opened or read. The sender often thinks the message or the offer was unattractive, when the reality is that too few people actually saw it. Don’t let this happen to you! Email marketing is one of the most effective and cost effective marketing tools on the planet – So long as you use it correctly.

If you have any email marketing tips you would like to share, please do so by leaving a comment below.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Email marketing and blog marketing – A quick tip!

February 1, 2010 by Jim Connolly

If you use email or blogging to market your services, I believe you will find the following information really useful.

It’s all about the importance of avoiding certain words or phrases in your emails and blog posts, which could get them blocked from reaching your readers.

Whilst there are many different things that can lead to an email getting trapped in someone’s junk mail or spam filters, I’m going to focus on just one of them; the words you use in your blog titles and your email subject lines.

What does blog marketing have to do with email filters?

Many people subscribe to blogs via email. For instance, around 40% of this blog’s RSS subscribers read it via email. So, if the title of one of my posts contains words or phrases that email filters are looking out for, there’s a good chance the post will get trapped in either the readers junk mail folder or it may never reach them at all.

I wrote a post last Friday, which had a title that was essentially a “toxic” phrase. The title was “REVEALED: The fast rack to wealth.” You can see the post here. It also had the opening word written in caps, which is another, lesser, junk mail trigger.

I was curious to see how many people opened it, compared to an average post. There was a drop of around 25%, pretty much what I had expected.

So, whilst it’s a great idea to use blog titles that will capture people’s attention – you need to also ensure that your titles are email friendly (if you offer the option for people to subscribe via email, which I believe you should.)

Email marketing and filters

Titles are also a key element in getting your marketing emails and newsletters past filters and in front of your readers. On my marketing newsletter, I opt for a very simple title: The Jim Connolly Newsletter. Keeping this very basic title format does 2 clever things.

Because it’s familiar, it immediately alerts my readers that the newsletter has arrived. If I used different titles every time, it would be harder for my newsletter to get noticed for what it is.
It contains nothing that’s likely to get trapped in a junk mail filter.

As I said earlier, there are a number of things, which can lead to your marketing email’s getting trapped in filters. Here’s a simple email marketing tip, from one of my first blog posts.

What’s on the outside counts too!

December 29, 2009 by Jim Connolly

This post is all about the importance of how you present and deliver your marketing messages. Content may be king, but if that content is delivered inappropriately, no one will read it.

Here’s a recent example of what I mean.

I was emailed today by a company that wanted me to buy some software. I could tell that from the subject line of their email. However, I have no idea what their software does or even how compelling their offer was. That’s because I never read their marketing message.

Why?

Because they emailed me using the free version of an emailing program, which inserted advertisements all over their marketing message. It immediately drew my attention away from their marketing message and caused me to wonder why they were using such a low class way of marketing their services. After all, emailing software is not expensive these days.

I drew a number of immediate, negative conclusions about the company that was trying to market to me. After all, how professional are they likely to be? They have just shown me, (and everyone else on their list), that they either think it’s OK for pictures of semi naked women advertising online casinos to be plastered all over their messages, or they were too unprofessional to check first. In either case, I was unimpressed.

My conclusions may or may not have been correct, but that’s not important. What’s important is that the way they delivered and presented their marketing to me, caused me to ask myself questions about them that they could easily have avoided.

More importantly, and the reason for this post, I was unimpressed before I even knew what they were offering!

The way they chose to present and deliver their marketing was enough in itself, to ruin any chance they had of winning my business. You might think that this is a rare example, but I see it many times every day. All day long I see people, who make such a mess of how they present and deliver their marketing message, that their message never gets the oxygen it needs, in order to work.

Here are some very common examples:

People who email you marketing messages, without your permission. They just add your email address to their list and spam you.
People who cold call you, reading from a script, showing you no respect for your individuality or needs.
People who have never previously connected with you, sending you messages on Twitter, with a link to a sales page for their wonder product.
People who walk up to you at a networking event and give you a sales pitch, whilst looking over your shoulder, eyeing up their next ‘victim.’

The bottom line here, is that if we want people to take our marketing seriously, we need to create a powerful, professional impression. We need to do everything possible to encourage them to trust us – and that includes the way we present and deliver our marketing messages, not just the content of those messages.

A letter from Google

June 2, 2009 by Jim Connolly

I received a sales letter last week from Google. That’s right, one of the world’s leading email providers contacted me; not via an email, but via a letter.

Email marketing and Google

Google already has my email address, because I am a user of a number of their services – including Gmail. So, it would have been very easy for them to have sent me the same sales message in an email. However, Google know that they will get a higher response rate from a targeted letter than from a sales email.

If the owners of Gmail are writing letters with sales offers, rather than sending sales emails, there’s a BIG marketing lesson here!

People hate sales emails and spam

People have a VERY low tolerance for emails, which are just sales messages. The letter from Google was exactly that – a sales message. However, I did open the letter and read it. Had Google sent me that same sales offer via email, it would have been deleted, unopened; as soon as I read the subject line (no matter how clever it was!)

The average person hates spam with a passion and many tend to consider all sales emails (no matter how well targeted) as spam. As a result, not only is a prospective customer or client unlikely to respond to a typical sales email, they are very likely to develop strong, negative feelings about the sender too.

Is email marketing dead

No, not at all! Email marketing, when handled correctly, is still extremely powerful and getting more powerful all the time.

If you re-read the above, you will see that I use the term ‘sales emails.’ Sales emails are extremely low leverage and increasingly ineffective. These are emails that contain a sales message and are often sent to a ‘list’, which the sender has either bought, borrowed or built by harvesting email addresses from business cards / directories etc.

Unless the sender has a good relationship / rapport with the people on that list, the sales emails they send will be deleted before they are read.

Email marketing & sales emails

Email marketing could not be more different. ~~For example, I write a very popular marketing newsletter~~, which contains a unique marketing article or some valuable marketing ideas / advice. Most editions have zero advertising. Occasionally, I will include a single, one paragraph piece to promote something I am involved in. The response rates are fantastic, because my readers already know me and trust me. Some of my readers even blog about how much they value my newsletter.

In fact, many of my readers tell me that they have ‘Jim Connolly’ marketing folders on their computers, where they file my newsletters, for future reading. How many people keep spam email or sales emails on file? No one!

Mail shots, direct mail, marketing letters

The overuse of sales emails is creating a growing resistance to them within the marketplace. Obviously, with so many businesses mass emailing sales offers to people, the amount of traditional marketing letters being sent has dropped enormously. As a consequence, marketing professionals are seeing traditional marketing letters, (sometimes called direct mailings or mail shots,) achieve better and better results.

A well crafted marketing letter, with a hand written signature, sent to a small, targeted group, with a compelling offer and a ‘call to action,’ can be extremely effective right now.

Mail shots or email marketing?

This is a HUGE subject. Here’s a very brief overview.

I suggest you try a professionally handled mail shot IF you provide a service, which is only offered to a relatively small geographical area. Some examples might include; accountants, commercial lawyers, franchise operators, insurance brokers etc. Let me be completely clear. I am not suggesting these types of service providers cease using email to market their services. I am suggesting they STOP using sales emails, START using email marketing AND consider trying a professionally handled, direct mail campaign as an addition to their marketing mix.

Jim Connolly’s marketing

I offer a service, which is sold internationally. As a direct result, 100% of my marketing is conducted online. My marketing approach is all about giving away free marketing advice, information and tips, to as many small and medium sized business owners as possible. Then, when they want someone to look after their marketing, they give me a call.

I don’t sell my services, people hire me instead. For those of you who provide services or products across a big or unlimited geographical area, I suggest you do exactly the same. Instead of sending sales emails; emails that just ‘push’ or attempt to sell your services – use email as a way to engage potential clients and provide massive value. Also, make sure that every person you send your information to has proactively sign-up to receive it. For example, don’t send newsletters or e-bulletins to people, just because you know them, are a member of the same network or you happen to have their business card.

Use email communication (and your website / blog / FaceBook / LinkedIn / Twitter) as a way to showcase your expertise and encourage potential clients to email you, call you, comment on your blog, follow your Twitter account etc, etc.

The results can be stunning!