It's Time to Reset Your Email Marketing

Neal Schaffer: 0:04

Welcome to maximize your social actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, and founder of maximize social business, Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer, welcome to another exciting episode of maximize your social. Well, for those of you that are friends or follow me on Facebook or Google Plus, I don't post the same social media message everywhere on every platform. So it would have been one of those two platforms. You may know that recently I had well, I guess you'd call it a torn ligaments. In my right pinky toe. I'm passionate about playing soccer, not only with my son, but I'm adult league here in Irvine, California. And I'm happy to report back to you that yesterday, I did practice with my team. And I plan to be in a game tonight. And I'm really excited about getting back into the action, although I still have a little bit of pain in my ankle. And in fact, as I walk around recording this podcast, in my home office here in Orange County, California, yesterday, during practice, I sort of tweaked my left ankle. So the net net of the story is be appreciative of what you have visa vie not only your health, but your physical health as well. I always thought, hey, no matter how old I am, I can get back out there and start exercising and playing things. And it's funny because my father in law said, Neil, everybody thinks that in their mind, they're 18 years old forever, when physically and everything else our bodies change over time. So that is my unrelated to social media advice for the day. But regardless of any physical liabilities are disabilities that I temporarily have, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, I'm always just glad to be alive and glad to be able to record these podcasts and really happy that I've had these experiences that I can share with you, to help you empower your social. Today, I actually don't want to talk about social. As you know, social media permeates everything, it it becomes part of what companies naturally do, it becomes part of their infrastructure. Social is being used, regardless of industry, regardless of department, but specifically, and I know a lot of you that listen to this podcast, or social media marketers, I want to talk a little bit about email, and email marketing. And my advice really is I really, after you listen to this podcast, I want you to do a hard reset, and alt control, delete on what you've been doing an email and I want to share with you what I've been doing an email. I've mentioned email marketing a few times during the course of this podcast. We're almost near number 60 Now, and one of them was after I came back from Infusionsoft University, Infusionsoft being an email marketing slash marketing automation software vendor. And what I learned that and I talked about this in the podcast was that email is like any other form of relationship building. Now, I have over time with windmill networking with maximize your social maximize social business, created quite a large list. And first of all, well, let's first understand that email marketing is still critical that even with social media, people are not on social media all the time. I stayed off Facebook the entire weekend. But guess what, when I get a new email, I have a little phone message that will say you've got mail. And if any of you have the LG G two, you may know what that sounds like. But you know, we are still many of us still cling to our email. And this is why not everybody is in the same place the same time. It's why you need to be on multiple social media platforms. It's why you need a website. It's also why you need email. So if you haven't put in strategic importance into your email, you should. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you obviously need to build a list. Now I have been able to build a list primarily because I have some ebook downloads. And I need to create more of those because I have the same month from two years ago, and people get sick of it. Even though I tend to get a lot of new visitors to my site, and it still gets downloads. You know, I think a lot of content marketing efforts, people forget about those downloadable resources that can help lead people into your marketing funnel, and they concentrate on blog posts and social media posts. Over the next month, I want you to create an e book based on blog posts based on your knowledge that someone can download. It doesn't take a lot of time, go into Microsoft Word, start typing it out once you get to 2000 words or 2500 words or 1500 words stop, okay, and then figure out how you're going to graphically organize it. If you're looking for help with creating any book let me know I'd be more than happy to share my resource with you and what have you but get out there and create something and once you create it make it easy for people when they come to your website to notice that they can easily download it. The other thing that you should be doing that's really helped me grow not only my list, but website traffic of last few months is, I had a downloadable link for the ebook. But I never had a link that says, hey, subscribe to daily updates from the blog, whenever we have a new blog post, we will email you and what I realized after including that in a prominent area, and I actually moved off of Infusionsoft, back to MailChimp, and I'm been very happy with that experience, if you're curious as to what I'm using, but that experience, and just starting everything afresh with MailChimp. And doing these things that I'm telling you, and I'll continue to talk about during this podcast has really helped me see new value. But anyway, I basically said, Hey, if you want to get the new blog posts, subscribe to the list. And before I was using a separate service, and many of you probably use, like Feedburner, I was using a separate service. But I wanted people that subscribe to the RSS to also subscribe to the newsletter. So I basically include it in one box, make it seamless, it's all been done through MailChimp. And it's helped me generate Well, close to 1000 new subscribers. In the course of well, a few months it's taken, but it's still a pretty significant number. And these people are getting daily updates. What it means when they get daily updates is they're tuned in. And when they're clicking on daily updates or opening them, I know that they are a very, very engaged audience that want more, they can't get enough. And those are some of the most valuable types of clients that you can have. Right. So do that. And it also generates more website traffic, they're not clicking, they're not opening every email, they're not clicking in every email that, hey, whatever they click on, is traffic that I didn't have before, right. But the other thing is now we get to really the core of your email marketing, which is what is going to be your message over the past year to a lot of internet marketers is that, hey, we can connect with a bunch of people on LinkedIn, download their email address, opt in to our newsletter and spam them. And that's absolutely if you know what I'm about, you know that that's not what I want you to do. You should never buy lists from third parties. When people opt in to your list, you should make it very clear as to what type of content you're going to deliver them on what frequency. But most importantly, I did not send out a newsletter to my list for awhile, it's probably been about a year. And even though I had plans to send them out on a monthly basis, I just couldn't do it. I just did not create you know, if content is king in marketing consistency is queen. And another quote I want to share with you. And this is from if you've read maximize your social, you've seen me speak on social media strategy. I'm a big fan of Edwards Deming, the godfather of quality control, is if you don't have a process for it, you have nothing. And as we grow our businesses, and if we do social media, and we need to hand it off to someone else, we need to create processes in everything that we do. You need a process with your email marketing, you need a process that's going to say, How can I hand this off to someone give them instructions, so that they could create 90% of it without me having to do anything. And that was my challenge. That's the number one challenge I had that I think that you should have. If you don't, the number two challenge is with all these other people competing for you know, with all these email newsletters and Google introducing the promotions tab and a lot of them and probably my newsletter as well, it's automatically going there, because it's sent from MailChimp, and MailChimp doesn't get a lot of love. But with those facts and with all these other newsletters and more and more consumers being able to control spam, I realized that I want to provide what are the newsletters that you open up, right? What are the newsletters that I open up, I opt into a lot of things. And I will archive a lot of newsletters and he's never open them. But there are a few newsletters that I really look forward to on a weekend weekend basis. And I want my newsletter to become one of those newsletters, something truly incredible that people will be waiting for. And it sort of goes back to at the beginning of the year I had this Go big or go home approach. If you're going to do something, make it count. If you're going to blog, make it count, don't blog daily or weekly because you have to only blog when you have really really valuable content to share. And I realized there's value that I can provide through the newsletter, and that there are certain types of content that people just can't get enough of and they want to have. What is meal Shaffers? What is maximize social business's unique perspective on the issue. So I literally over the past few months when I switched from Infusionsoft MailChimp, and I got my infrastructure going on my website. And I'm in the process of writing a new ebook. And I really want to come out with ebooks on a monthly basis. If you're curious, let's, let's see how well I do about that by the end of the year. But I realized that I did not want to send out any emails to the list if I didn't feel they were a value. On the flip side, I realized that those who opt in the email marketing, it's a temporary lifespan, you need to continue that relationship because if you don't email people for a few months, they're not going to remember you they're going to report for spam or maybe they're just they just don't have any need for you anymore although they did at that time. So I wanted to rekindle those Is relationships, right? But I needed to offer something of value. And I finally, over the last week or so said, you know, this is it. This is something that is unique to the brand of maximize social business, it's unique to something that we can do. Because our blog is not about one perspective, but about many perspectives. And in fact, you know, whether it's from the M, social business, Twitter handle our Facebook page, or my own accounts, I share a lot of other people's contents. And that's my own unique filter, right? And that filter is a value to many people. So I finally came out with the newsletter idea. Okay, the next thing that I thought of, well, how am I going to graphically show this? So I've talked time in and time out about the importance of the visual, in fact, the importance of the visual voice for some of you who saw me speak at Social Media Marketing World. And this this notion of the visual, how do I leverage that in email, I leverage it, you know, if you've been looking at maximize social business recently, we've been adding pinnable images to replace the stock photos. That's one way of leveraging the, the visual there, how do I leverage it in my newsletter, and basically, if you're a subscriber to the maximize social business newsletter, if you're not, I hope you'll go over to maximize social business.com and an OPT yourself in in the top right hand corner there. You know, when you receive it, you'll see it is it is I won't say 100% visual, but it's primarily visual. And when I looked around at all these sites that say, these are the newsletters that we like to read, you know, week in week out part of it's the content, but part of it, believe it or not, as also the visuals, I wanted to create something that would be not only intellectually stimulating, but also visually stimulating, I hope that I was able to do that. Now, if you're a large business, then creating an email template is not a big deal. If you're a small business, or you're a social media marketer or a solopreneur, like I am, you may not have the graphic background to be able to do it. And guess what, it becomes very, very hard to do it within MailChimp or within some of these other programs. So I'm going to give you one bit of advice, and I was actually thinking of hiring a company to do it for me, when I realized, wow, you know, if you're able to hack together a WordPress page, you're able to hack together a pretty good looking email newsletter, you know, visually, and like I said, opt in. And if you don't get the newsletter, ping me, I'll forward you one of the old editions of this new template. But basically, I pay $20 for a custom template. And I within it took me a few hours, I'll be honest. But once I had the concept that what I wanted to do, I was able to basically modularly fit together blocks of content to be able to create the newsletter that I sent out. And I want to share that with you, I plan to write a blog post on it with more details. But there are resources out there. If you're looking to bootstrap this, to help you really create a compelling email newsletter. So don't just send out email newsletters because you have a list. And don't send them out weekly, because you feel you have to, I want you to do a reset. And I want you to really think about what value is that newsletter providing to your subscribers, not to you as a business, but to your subscribers. And I'm not saying you can't send out self promotional emails, you know, there are clothing labels, where I want to know every time they have a new piece of clothing out, I want to know I want to be the first to know right? If you're in that business, great keep doing what you're doing. But if you're not, and you're not offering a type of product or you're not offering you don't have new products coming out every month, or you don't have new insight coming out every month, you really got to think hard as to am I providing value because guess what, if you're not providing enough value, and people are not waiting for the next edition of your newsletter, you're going to lose their attention over time because more and more people are getting better at offering better and better content better and better email newsletters and, and people all over the planet. So that's my bit of advice for today. I know it's not purely on the social, but I think anybody who does social media also probably does email and web as well. So I still think it's relevant. Hey, you know, I appreciate you joining me on this journey. And I'm always really excited to be doing these podcasts. I don't necessarily blog every week. But podcasting is something I've been able to speak to. I'm really passionate about what I do. I hope it offers you value if you found it valuable. I really appreciate any ratings, comments on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud wherever I may be. And as always, if I can be of any help to you, if you want me to cover something on this podcast, send me a message you can find me anywhere on social media. I am obviously someone that lives up to the quote one of my favorite quotes from Woody Allen, which is 80% of success is showing up and I tried to show up everywhere I can so you should be able to find me. But that is it for a another episode of maximize your social everybody. Wherever you are in the world. Make it a social day. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions, ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com make it a social day.