1 of the 6 pillars of digital marketing is email marketing, but it's often the one easy to forget as most talk about more trendy topics such as social media marketing, content marketing, or influence marketing (I'm partly to blame!). Based off of webinars I provided for both the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland as well as the email marketing software company GetResponse, learn all you wanted to know to get you inspired to do more with email marketing and lead magnets.
Key Highlights
[03:54] The 6 Things You Can Do In Digital Marketing
[07:36] The Value of Email Marketing
[09:36] How To get Repeated Touches
[11:05] Active Email Account Statistics
[12:18] Email Marketing ROI
[15:12] How To Grow Email List?
[16:47] Essential Components of A Lead Magnet
[17:35] Mistake Brand Do In Email Marketing
[19:29] Other Ideas For Lead Magnets
[23:10] Different Approaches To Grow Your Email List
Notable Quotes
Links mentioned in the show:
Episodes mentioned in the show
Learn More:
1 of the 6 pillars of digital marketing is email marketing, but it's often the one easy to forget as most talk about more trendy topics such as social media marketing, content marketing, or influence marketing (I'm partly to blame!). Based off of webinars I provided for both the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland as well as the email marketing software company GetResponse, learn all you wanted to know to get you inspired to do more with email marketing and lead magnets.
Key Highlights
[03:54] The 6 Things You Can Do In Digital Marketing
[07:36] The Value of Email Marketing
[09:36] How To get Repeated Touches
[11:05] Active Email Account Statistics
[12:18] Email Marketing ROI
[15:12] How To Grow Email List?
[16:47] Essential Components of A Lead Magnet
[17:35] Mistake Brand Do In Email Marketing
[19:29] Other Ideas For Lead Magnets
[23:10] Different Approaches To Grow Your Email List
Notable Quotes
Links mentioned in the show:
Episodes mentioned in the show
Learn More:
This is the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help sales and marketing professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners, build, leverage and monetize their influence in digital and social media. Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode actually episode number 161 of the maximize your social influence podcast. When we look at all the options we have in digital and social media marketing, one that often gets left behind, but might be the most powerful one is actually something I want to talk about today, I realized, you know, I've been listening, as I mentioned, several podcasts episodes ago, really immersing myself in listening to podcasts, myself becoming a consumer. And I realized that there are so many podcasters that have grown, because and I think this is really good advice for those of you that want to become more influential as well for bringing people along on your journey. Right. And that's really where you build fans, you build community, you build emotional attachments, and I realized that I haven't been doing as much of that as I used to do in earlier podcasts. So today, I want to share with you I work with a few universities around the world. So Rutgers business school in New Jersey, where I actually teach as part of two programs there. Every year, I fly back to Dublin, to teach at the Irish Management Institute. And I also do work with the University of vascular in Finland. What I do with them, as I've taught at their executive MBA course in Helsinki, have consulted with their marketing faculty at their headquarters in New Haskalah. And they often bring Finnish entrepreneurs, innovators, companies out to the United States on tours. And I often speak to them when they stopped by Los Angeles, which they inevitably do. So I did a webinar for the alumni of the Executive MBA, some of them had seen me speak or heard me speak. So as always an honor I really enjoy working with the faculty they are They're really great people. And Finland is just a very, very innovative country. You know, Finland, they brought us Nokia, they brought us Angry Birds. For a small company. They are extremely, extremely innovative and entrepreneurial, and very advanced in progressive in many ways. So always great to engage with the audience there. So the webinar, and I've been doing a lot of these recently, was all about obviously, how to react to COVID-19. And because we're in the United States, and probably for many reasons, are one of the worst performing countries in terms of COVID-19 right now. And Europe is obviously doing very different depending on the country, but Finland has been OK, schools have already been reopened. But still, like any other society, with COVID-19, what do we do now, if you're listening to this podcast for the first time, I've already recorded a few episodes with my advice. And I'll make sure that I put those in the show notes. So there's a lot of advice I already have for you. But for this audience, I wanted to give areas, or I should say I wanted to give advice around a few different areas that I thought were opportunities for today in terms of marketing communication, for companies, for entrepreneurs, for small business owners. So with that in mind, I may make this a series of podcasts. But the first one I want to talk about as the one I talk about today is the role of email marketing, emails, not something I've think of ever talked about on this podcast. But when you think about it, right? I always put up the slide whenever I speak, because I like to approach Digital Influence and in digital marketing extremely holistically, right, there's only six different things you can do, I think, and everything you do, probably falls into one of these six things. So obviously, you have a website, right? That's your digital store, your digital presence, your digital existence comes from a website, it might also be an app. And I suppose if you are doing e commerce, maybe that's a Shopify website or a big commerce website. But nevertheless, you need to have a website if you want to be present. Right. And I was talking to a realtor last night, who is has a website but it's with his Realtors group that he's with, you know, one of these big national real estate companies. So for him, the website, probably not as important. But for most companies, you know, if you're a restaurant, maybe your Yelp page is your website, I don't know, but there is some notion of a digital presence and I think we all have that and we all invest in that in build that. So we're not going to talk much about that. But we go to number two now because once you have a website, you need to make sure that your website is found in Google and in search engine. So that's where you have organic search engine optimization, or SEO, we talked about that last episode, or you have paid SEO, which in essence is Pay Per Click advertising to make sure that you show up in the Google search results. And then we get to email. So probably the reason why people don't talk about email a lot is it's been around I mean, it's it's been around for a long time is, as early as the internet, we had email. But at the end of the day, and I'm going to go through the other things I mentioned, there are six things we have the email being the third, we have content marketing, which includes your blogging, which includes your lead generation assets, this becomes the fourth thing, we have social media marketing, like search engine optimization, we have the organic and the paid. And then we have the influencer marketing. And this is my definition, as you know, of Digital Influence goes beyond those celebrity influencers, that it overlaps, nano micro influencers, your brand advocates and followers and your employees. And that's something we obviously talk a lot about here. But what we can do to expand our influence isn't limited to just that we can do it in any one of these areas. And email to me is a really fascinating area. I think what really turned me on to pursuing more in email marketing, was when I saw Joe Pulizzi talk at Adobe Summit, this is back in 2017. Joe is the godfather of content marketing, as I always refer to him. And this is the Adobe summit where if you read the age of influence, I talk about the invitation of influencers to attend the event. And the amount of impressions just mentions of hashtags for the Adobe Summit, and the amplification of those generated, you know, millions of dollars in advertising value for inviting, you know, a dozen or two dozen influencers to the event. So that's where I saw Joe and I tweeted this out. And I often include these tweets in my presentations, I think he said that 98% of copy bloggers ROI, or, you know, sales comes from email marketing, and this is a blogger, right? And you're like, wait, it doesn't come from this blog. It's like, no, it comes from people who go to the website, read the blog, opt in on the email, and then he's able to put people in a marketing funnel that he controls. So that's sort of the preview of what I want to talk about today. And I want to give you some advice from another webinar I did recently with an email marketing software company called Get Response. So the value of email marketing today just to begin, I think we always have to remember, as much as we talk about social media and the great things that social media can do for us. It is borrowed land, we don't own it. And as someone, you know, I had like 60,000, Google plus followers, I, there are podcasters, who had Google plus followers and hundreds of 1000s ain't worth a lot right now. Right? So it's borrowed land. And at the end of the day, we want people on our island, our websites, right, that's where the magic happens. That's where we communicate with people the way we want, any way we want with our branding. And that's where we literally sell. So we also need to meet people where they are. And this defines what you do in digital. And I wish you could see my presentation right now because it's a it's a picture of three RV campers overlooking an ocean almost like you know, like a campground off of Pacific Coast Highway highway one here up the coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And then in front of one camper, I say search in front of the second I say social in front of the third I say email. So here's the thing, right? What are people doing online? They're either searching for information, they're on social media, or they are reading emails now. Yeah, they're watching Netflix as well. They're texting, I get that. But the main things from a digital marketing perspective, it's all about search social email, and that's why I break it up into those six different things. Okay, social, there's a lot you can do influencer marketing, overlap, social. A lot overlaps that search piece, right? Your Content Marketing overlaps, the search in your social media overlaps the search in some ways, as well, as well as influencer marketing potentially. So but the email sort of sits by itself, right. And, you know, the importance of content and SEO, you know, the importance of social I find when I talk to a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs, that the email part is a huge missing link. They really don't understand it's supreme importance, but it is one of those three major areas where you need to meet people where they are. Here's another thing for any of you who have a sales background like I do, we know it takes multiple touches to convert a generated lead. It's not going to happen overnight. Some people say it takes five touches to other people say it takes a dozen touches. I just say look, it's gonna take like between five to 20 touches to get to someone to know like and trust you right? How are you going to get those repeated touches, it comes through Email, it's probably not going to come on social media because with the algorithms your post is not seen by every fan every time. And obviously, in search, it's hard to guarantee that every time they're going to search for a keyword you're going to show up. So email provides the best way to repeatedly touch it also helps you control the research phase of the buying process. Whenever someone is going to be researching your competitors, or they want to learn more about your products and services, they're going to go all over the place, they're going to find lots of different reviews on lots of different sites. But if you are sending them email on a regular basis that they're engaging with, you are influencing their purchasing decision through those emails. So they think you know what, I don't even have to go through any research to find what I'm looking for part of that know like and trust. And I'll put a link to this in the show notes as well. I recently published a blog post on some pretty impressive email marketing statistics that you may not be as familiar with, as I hope you might be. So there's a lot of other reasons why email marketing is so compelling. There are currently 3.8 billion active email accounts, we talk about Facebook having like 2 billion accounts, we can't forget that someone may not be on Facebook, but they probably have an email account. 59% say that email directly influences their purchasing decision. Not surprised. Here's one, your message is five times more likely to be seen through email than Facebook. This is because of the way that social media and algorithms work. And the ROI is impressive. There were two different studies, one in the UK, one in the US, but they equal the same pretty much that for every dollar you spend sending emails, you make $40 in sales, and here's why. What is the cost of SEO, its content creation, it's, you know, potentially paying someone to do SEO for you on a regular basis. It's guest blogging, it's generating backlinks, there's a lot of work involved. And you need to keep at it. Because you always have that competition. Well, what about the social side, a lot of content creation takes a long time to get there, right? Well, or you're going to pay for advertising. And I think a 40 to one ROI on any type of advertising is is very, very difficult to come by emails, when you think about it, the cost of sending the email is the email marketing software. And if you don't have 10,000 subscribers, that cost is more than likely going to be like$100 a month. But with a little bit of time, because email is not about sending long emails, they're short and sweet, right. And using marketing automation, putting together sequences and drips. For a small investment of time and even smaller investment of money, you can really generate a lot of ROI. And you can scale. It's not limited by an advertising budget. And that's why it's so powerful. And that's why it has such a great ROI. In fact, if you look a lot of different studies that look at they compare marketing ROI wise, email usually comes on top social media is not bad either, believe it or not. But email is usually the one on top if you were to do some research, and then in the webinar, I shared some more interesting statistics. These come from OptinMonster OptinMonster is one of my favorite sort of pop up widgets to use. On my website, email, there are more users than social media users, there are 3.4 billion social media users but mentioned before 3.8 billion email accounts in terms of a preferred channel for promotions. 60% of businesses favor email over social media, which is at 20%, the conversion rate on email at 6% versus a 1.9% on social media, and the open click through engagement rate, you're lucky to get a 1% engagement rate on social media these days. If you're a business phone, you think about it, you get 20 to 30% of people to open your emails, and you get 12345 6% click through, right. That's huge when you compare to social media. And that's why the ROI is so much greater in a one on one comparison with social media. So the missing link, though, if you want to do this right is and there's a few things you need to have in place. And maybe if you respond well to this podcast episode, I'll talk more about this in future episodes. So make sure you you come in somewhere reach out to me on social media or what have you is where we talk about lead magnets. So this comes from I mentioned I recently did a webinar with get response. They're one of the leading email marketing software's out there. And they have a really cool unique functionality, which is the automated creation of a lead magnet funnel, which allows you to build a landing page, the emails, the distribution of that lead magnet and even social media adspend all within one tool get response which is pretty cool. So that's where you know i i started to develop more content around lead magnets and that's what that webinar was really about. But you need to understand the value of the Email Marketing until you can understand the value of the lead magnets. But this is where the magic happens. And this is where probably a lot of you are already familiar with the term or already creating some of these. But just in case, here's what it is right? How are you going to grow your list? Are you going to ask people on your website to subscribe? We know that this is not a very, very effective way to grow a list and you can't be effective in email marketing, unless you have a list, right? Are you going to ask your social media followers to subscribe? Are you going to post an Instagram an image that says subscribe to my list, not gonna be very effective, are you going to do pay per click or Facebook ads asking people to subscribe, you're going to pay a lot of money, and you're not going to get a very good result, you need an incentive to get people to subscribe to receive communication from you that incentive is called a lead magnet, right? It is an incentive. And lead magnets can be many, many different things, the way they get response to find lead magnets is a lead magnet is a free incentive that you give away to your website visitors, it's meant to capture their attention and convince them to provide you with their contact details. Typically an email address and a name, I like to get a first name, some people like to get first and last names. But that's pretty much it. Now, the lead magnet is an incentive that you give away to your website visitors. It doesn't mean you can't give it away in social media as well, which you can and you should. But the idea is, if we put all of this in a marketing funnel, right? We have lots of people on social media, we want to get them to our website, when they come to our website, we want to continue that relationship when they leave the website. And the only way to do that it's going to be through email, well, we pray that they return. And once again, it's probably not going to be very effective. So that's where we want to acquire an email address to continue that conversation and bring them lower and lower in our funnel so that we can convert them. So the essential components of a lead magnet is you know, first and foremost, you got to provide value, no one's going to give up their email address for something that you don't provide value on, you need to give an easy win or solve a problem. This is a great way of giving value. But you also need to generate demand for your products and services. And here's one that a lot of people miss out on, you qualify purchase intent. If I had an email marketing course that I was selling on my site, if people opt into my email list, and I got them to opt in, because my lead magnet was all about the mistakes, you're making an email marketing. I know that because someone downloaded an ebook on email marketing mistakes, they probably are very, very interested in email marketing, and they're probably a prime candidate for my course. So if you're just giving away an iPad, to build up your email list, you're not qualifying purchase intent. You're qualifying the fact that people love iPads, right? And this is where a lot of brands, I don't think they do this a lot today, where a lot of brands have made mistakes in the past. So here's one for you. This is something I've always tried to do. I've had people say, Neil, your newsletter is awesome. I don't do a lot of automated sequences, I'm doing a little bit more of them. But when people subscribe to my newsletter, I'm not trying to sell them anything. I want to build that relationship I want to provide value, right? When I'm on a webinar, I want to invite them to it when I have a new book out, I want to let them know about that. So my main lead magnet is a newsletter and I have for those of you that are not on my list. I have a weekly newsletter, and I have a monthly newsletter. Depending on the frequency of when you want to receive things. I also have a daily newsletter which is basically the RSS feed. So here's one for you can a newsletter be considered a lead magnet, and I use the example of my friend Jay Baer over a convincing convert and he has a dedicated page for his email newsletter. And this is the way he portrays it on his website. The most relevant email and content social digital CX, a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep your arm keep you on top from Jay Baer convincing convert join 75,000 of the world's smartest marketers to receive marketing's most relevant email hitting your inbox just once per week. Each issue will be devoted to key trends and several of these pillars content marketing, social media amplification, word of mouth marketing, social customer service. In each week's email, Jay will recap what happened in digital what trends are important for marketers to watch? Plus some fun surprises that you just have to sign up to see, that's awesome, right? That's if you put that much thought into how valuable of a resource your weekly or monthly newsletter is going to be. Then yes, that newsletter might just be considered a lead magnet. Now, I also have lots of other ideas for lead magnets. So the traditional ones that people think of our checklist list Cheat Sheet worksheet, right? Just a simple one page PDF that's related to the blog post or podcast by the way, we know that Amy Porterfield is really good at having some sort of lead magnet for every single podcast episode. Something real simple that people can just you know, instead of having to take notes, they can just grab the one page PDF checklist. You're providing value, you're giving an easy win. It could be templates of some sort. A lot of designers do this with, like Canva templates, it could be swipe files, Hey, you want to, you know, create great social media content or create great email newsletters. Here's 100 Different newsletter swipe files that you can easily copy and paste and customize and use on your own. Quizzes are big BuzzFeed, I think was one of the pioneers in this. But there are platforms that interact as a great platform that helps you create these viral types of quizzes, that people will give their email address to find out what personality type they are, and often share them with their friends and social media. Email courses are popular as well join our seven day go from zero to 1000 email subscriber challenge, and it's a course right ebooks very popular do a lot of those. It could be an audio or video recording or training. It could be a webinar webinars, obviously one of the most popular types of lead magnets for each one of these things. Once again, you're providing value. And in exchange for that you're acquiring an email address. But it can also be some other things and a lot of what I talked about previously, we're we're primarily not limited to but a lot of b2b companies, content centric approach to building a list. But there's a lot of other things that even b2c companies can do contests and giveaways. I'm excited because hopefully by the time this publishes, you'll be able to see if you go to my website, a marketing book giveaway that I'm doing, I had a lot of great friends endorse the age of influence like Mark Schaefer, and Jay Baer. And I could go on and on Andy Crestodina, Carla Johnson, John Lee Dumas. And so basically, they've been nice enough to contribute their books, and I'm going to match their books with the age of influence, and do a big giveaway. And you know, there'll be 58 winners, and each of the 58 Winners will have to have two books one of mine and one of their ship to them, right. And people have to give their email address to apply to win, right? It this is a very, very simple way in a very, very short amount of time to probably grow your list. And in fact, this might just be the most powerful one. And it's not just growing, this giveaways are great for growing your Instagram followers or Facebook fans, or what have you, the quality, right? Remember, when I talked about qualifying purchase intent, if you're giving away an iPad, you're going to get anyone and everyone, if you're giving away something that's very, very limited, that's hard for someone to resell, that someone that's entering any and every conscious might not be interested in, which I'm hoping is the case with the marketing book, I think that the list you acquire is going to be a little bit more relevant. So we can do coupons. I have a b2c client of mine, you know, get 10% off your first order, you know, with from their e commerce shop, these things work really, really well. offering free trials, like if you're a software company or offering live demos, right, hate sign up to receive notification of our next live demo session. These are great ways to acquire email addresses, great lead magnet ideas. So I think that's regardless of your business. There. It's a great idea here for you to get some create something. And it could just be as easy as a 10% coupon or doesn't require any time grow your list. And from there, you're gonna have to figure out what to do with it. Right. I think that there's a few different approaches. There's the newsletter approach. And it's really funny, because I mentioned Jay Baer, I remember meeting Jay for the first time at Blog World, man, this is a decade ago, you may not even remember it, but it was before Social Media Marketing World This was the epic marketing event for you know, digital and social blogging, what have you. And I'll never forget, Jay had just come out with a now revolution, which is going to be one of the books that's going to be given away that he co wrote with Amber Naslund, who at the time was the community manager for radian six, which was the leading social listening to him. I'm definitely aging myself as I go through this with you. But he and Amber spoke about it. And they were giving away free preview editions that were on every seat. And at the evening mixer. I like rub shoulders with Jay. I'm like, Hey, man, how's it going? You love your stuff? And, and he's just one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. And like, Jay, tell me about email marketing, ma'am. And currently, I'm like sending out to my list, like once a month, what do you think he goes, dude, you got to be doing at least once a week. If you're not doing once a week, you're not keeping in touch they forget about you. Ideally, you know, even multiple times a week is great. But you know, once a week is the minimum. And I mean, I asked him a few other questions and what have you, but that like really stuck with me, even to today. And that's why I have this concept of a weekly newsletter, but also knowing dependent on how people opted in how much they like know and trust me, I keep that monthly option for those that might not know me as deeply as those like leads that I might get from partners versus leads die directly again, if that makes sense. So you know, going forward, that's how you grow the list. What you do with the list. Like I said that newsletter, if you are in an industry where you want to provide timely updates, which for me, you know what I do in digital social media marketing, it makes complete sense. And I also create a lot of content so I want people to consume that. blog content as well, which I weave in the weekly and monthly newsletter, that makes a lot of sense. Other companies, maybe just once a month, they do a campaign based on a holiday to get people to buy others, they don't do any newsletter, they just contact you when they have a big promotion. And that may not even be once a month. Others are very sophisticated. When you opt in, they drop you into a sequence of emails, and based on how you respond to those emails, they send you more or less email. So this is going to take a little bit more time to set up, it's going to require some sophisticated marketing automation, but that's really the direction that you want to be going in. And then you're really then qualifying that purchase intent through these automations and the sending of emails on a personalized one to one basis. And then sometimes your your qualifying them within a week or two. The problem is not everybody is ready to buy. So you don't want to overly spam people. And that's where this marketing automation really becomes an art in many ways. So that was a lot, you might already be doing all this, in which case great if you are curious. And I'm going to put this in the show notes as well. I also came out in addition to the email statistics blog post, a blog post just over the last week on 15, different email marketing software programs that I recommend. So everyone's heard of MailChimp. But have you heard of mailer light or Active Campaign or get response. And there's a lot of great software out there that will help you do this sort of marketing automation that I'm talking about. In fact, they'll help you bridge that gap like get response does, of being able to easily publish that lead magnet on your site through pop ups or widgets, and then automatically adding these people into your list, where they automatically get added into this marketing automation sequence where they automatically get messages. And this is how you can scale your Digital Influence. In fact, email marketing may be the cheapest, most effective way to scale your Digital Influence when you think of it that way. So I hope you enjoy the episode. As always, I really appreciate all the great feedback that those of you that have read the age of influence that have given me and the reviews on Amazon, I really appreciate it. I do now over the last week I've been busy as you can hear I do now finally i If you listen to a previous episode, we're actually read you the first I read you the introduction, not the entire first chapter. But now I have a free download of the introduction. And the first chapter that you can access, I'm going to put that in the show notes as well, this is going to be a pretty important show notes as you can hear of all the links I'm going to drop for you. But I also want to thank those of you that have subscribed and have gone out of their way to write a review for this podcast on Apple and Apple podcast, I look at my stats every week, it still generates a majority of the listeners hear obviously, if you want to review this in Spotify, or wherever I'm equally happy. But you know, I do go back to Apple that is sort of the biggest place where people listen to podcasts. And therefore when you read review there, it really does have impact on how many other people get exposed my podcast, so I want to share a recent one. Hi, Neil, I just started listening to your informative podcast thank you for the wealth of information you provide. I'm fortunate enough to have the time now to be able to process what you're saying and implement some of these strategies into my company's social media platform. I just ordered your latest book, Age of influence and Amazon. I'm looking forward to hearing more from you. Stay healthy. Best regards, Sherry Frank GS inspirations. Sherry, thank you so much for that comment. That review really means the world to me. And hopefully next week, I'll be able to read a review from one of you. Alright, everybody, hope this podcast episode had a lot of impact. We're gonna keep this party going. I'm not slowing down. Got some great podcast guests that are coming up. I hope you like that last episode with Cyrus Shepard all about SEO. That's that search component. We talked about social as well. We have some other great interviews coming up. And also I will always be interspersed in the interviews with my own solo shows, sharing with you what I learned on my journey of helping my clients with their digital and social media marketing. So wherever you are in the world, everybody make it a great virtual social Day. Bye Bye now.