Have you noticed?
Email open rates are down – click through rates are down – and sometimes, no matter how large your subscriber list may be, you find yourself asking, “Is anybody out there?”
Bad news: Chances are that if you’re doing email marketing the same way that you were doing it 10 years ago, 5 years ago – or heck, even 2 years ago – your email strategy is getting less and less effective.
And you’re probably not even sure what’s broken or how to fix it.
Here’s the deal – email marketing is about relevance.
Email marketing is about value.
And email marketing is about connecting with the right people at the right time for the right reason.
This final element is EXACTLY what’s missing in your current email strategy!
Meaning – you are treating all your email subscribers, blog fans, and social media followers in the exact same way.
Some of these folks are receiving their very first communication from you.
There is zero “know-like-trust” factor at this point.
And they might not even quite know how they landed in your world – was it a Facebook ad, blog post, Twitter link, video?
They were just mindlessly surfing and BAM! they found you.
Now, compare that to the communication that you’d send to your very best paying clients. People who already have a deep, trusting relationship with you and who have already invested in your company’s products, services, and programs…
Would you treat them the same as a first-time website visitor?
Hmmm…
If this sounds like the way you’re doing email marketing, then the missing piece for your business is a well-defined marketing funnel.
A marketing funnel is simply a fancy word for a programmatic sequence of touchpoints – emails, videos, blog posts, webinars, PDFs, and other helpful communications – delivered in a specific sequence to a specific subset of people specifically interested in a certain one of your products, services, or programs.
A marketing funnel is your lifeline that keeps you connected to prospects who are at various phases of the buying cycle – from merely interested in the topic (browsers) all the way to committed to investing in your solutions/services (buyers).
A well-designed marketing funnel will take a cold lead from initial contact to signed contract in a pre-determined sequence designed to both add value, and invite offers to your relevant investable opportunities.
Without a marketing funnel in place, you will never get off the “feast or famine” revenue roller coaster.
And worse, you risk alienating people who are NOT interested in buying today while completely missing out on sales to the hot prospects who are ready to buy right now.
Here are the 7 reasons your email marketing is getting less and less effective:
- Treating all your email subscribers the same – whether they’ve been on your list for 10 years or 10 minutes
- Not segmenting your email list based on relevance, interests, and behaviors
- Constantly nurturing and never making any offers (aka selling). An email strategy that’s based on adding value without ever making an offer is a surefire path to disappointment and complaints that “email marketing doesn’t work”
- Constantly selling and never adding value. Similarly, if all that your subscribers get from you is an endless parade of direct sales pitches for your products, services, and programs, they’ll unsubscribe in droves (“Buy this – buy that – Buh bye!”)
- Not being programmatic in your email and content marketing. Who gets what and when and why? Hint: This can easily be set up with a simple marketing funnel and put into operation in your business over the next 7 days.
- Not having different marketing funnels for people in different phases of the buying cycle. My friend, Scott Oldford, calls these three phases – people on the sidewalk (first-time visitors aka browsers) – people in your slow lane (interested but not committed to buy) – and people in your fast lane (committed to solve their problem and highly likely to buy from you)
- Thinking that marketing funnels are too complex, or only for the “big guys” who have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of emails or get tons of traffic to their website. Nope – marketing funnels are for YOU no matter how large or small your current list might be. As a matter of fact, the sooner you get this right, the faster your list will grow!
The great news: You can start right now – whether you have 10,000 subscribers or 10.
If you want to build your list exponentially faster – and have your subscribers, fans, and followers a. stick around a lot longer and b. buy a lot more, then you’ll get busy implementing marketing funnels in your business right away.