I made a comment on a blog recently that started a big discussion.  The comment was that “spam is in the eye of the receiver.” Why did this solicit so many comments?

Gone are the days of mass mailing everyone from your Outlook address book. For those of you who want to use email as a marketing technique, you want your email list to be targeted, professional, and polished. You also don’t want to spam people or black list your email server. That’s why using a service like Constant Contact for mass emails (also called email blasts) is recommended.

The most import thing to remember about spam is:  “Spam is in the eye of the receiver.”  It is easy for anyone to mark your email as spam.  If I signed up for your emails a few month ago, but I forgot that I did; your message is spam to me.  I may even report it as spam -  AND reporting a message as spam can be as simple as one click of the mouse.

Here’s the catch with email.

If you do it right, email works to grow your business. If you do it wrong, people think it’s spam, and people hate spam. Hate isn’t one of the buying emotions, is it? So I think it’s safe to say that you don’t want people to hate your communications. In order to steer your business away from negative perceptions and towards positive ones, you need to practice email marketing, not spam marketing.

Email Marketing is:

… delivering professional email communications, to an interested audience, containing information they find valuable.  Let’s examine that definition:

Delivering professional email communications. ‘Professional’ means sending emails that represent the characteristics of your business visually (your brand), while delivering information that educates your audience and/or differentiates your business from the competition.

To an interested audience. An ‘interested’ audience is comprised of people who are familiar with you and your business and have asked to receive your communications.

Containing information they find valuable. If your communications aren’t valuable and appreciated by your audience, no one will want to receive them.

To Spam or Not to Spam – it really isn’t a question

People hate spam.  But they love messages that contain relevant information that they can use.

Are there emails that you get from people you know, like and trust?  Which ones do you read and which ones do you just delete?

It is like marriage

I have been married for 14 years now.  (sweet, glorious years!)  When I first met my wife, I didn’t say, “Hey let’s get married.”  We talked.  We got to know each other.  We spent hours learning about each other.  One date at a time.  When I knew she was the one – and we completed the transaction with marriage

Do you date your customers?

What?  Date your customers?  Do you put out an ad and expect your customers to flock to your door or create a great website and expect orders to start rolling in?  It doesn’t happen.  If it does, it doesn’t last.  Did you know there are more small businesses that fail each year than marriages?

It takes time, money, energy, and effort

It takes 5 – 10 communications to generate a sale from a prospective new customer.  (how many dates did you have before you found the right person?)   Here’s why:

• Either, you have a totally new product or service few people have heard of…then your challenge is education. What is it? Why is it useful? Why is it worth paying for?
• Or you have a product or service everyone knows about…then your challenge is differentiation. Why are you better, faster, cheaper, more convenient, and so on?

Know, Like and Trust

A single promotion that ‘educates’ your audience or ‘differentiates’ you still is unlikely to create enough profit to encourage enough people to buy from you.  What are the chances that after one promotion, a new customer is going to buy from you?  Marketing your business isn’t an event; it’s a series of related events. It’s a process. It’s a relationship.

The purpose of your marketing should be to find a customer, who has a need, to know you, like you, and trust you.  That is my favorite definition of marketing – and it lends itself well to the rest of this article….

Spend Money Wisely

If you spend all of your money trying to market to new customers, you are always marketing to people that do NOT know you – if they don’t know you, they may not like you – and they definitely don’t have enough trust built up to buy from you immediately. It is expensive to attract new client; as high as 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than attract repeat business from your existing customers.

So why not spend your time focusing on your current client base, while lowering your cost to build the “know, like, trust’ with new customers?

Your Most Powerful Mode of Building Relationships

Emailed Newsletter.  Email is the perfect way to connect with your audience.  We are addicted to email.  How many time to you check your email?  Do you leave it on all day?  Do you get it delivered to your cell phone?  Do you check your email before you go to bed?

E-newsletters are easy to assemble, cost nothing (or very little) to send, have a higher open rate than regular direct mail, and gain loyal readers. PLUS, it is measurable!

• Want to know how many of your newsletters were opened?  You will know.
• Want to know which customers consistently read your newsletters? You can!
• Want to know what is the most popular article in your newsletter?  Yes, you will know that too.

My Favorite Tool

My favorite tool for managing e-newsletters is Constant Contact.  We have been using them for years, and I trust them with my email campaigns.  Their tools allow your customers to subscribe to your newsletter; but they also manage the process for your customers to un-subsribe.  This is important.

ONE ACTION ITEM: To try Constant Contact free for one month.  Sign up and give it a try.

Do you want even more tips?  Sign up for my companies’ newsletter to see how we use Constant Contact.  You can always unsubscribe – so what is stopping you from giving it a try?