Overcome Your Email Addiction

Show Notes

• Enrich your media selections and don’t rely only upon email to deliver your messages.
• One of the primary uses of InfusionSoft is email deliverability and consequently, sending an email shouldn’t be thought of as free.
• Email is a media, but not THE media to use.
• The more messages you send that are not focused or not well-thought out, the more attention you spend. Your customer’s attention can be spent very quickly.
• Email inboxes are bombarded with marketing emails.
• Gmail’s Inbox makes it easy to ignore marketing emails.
• Make sure your business model allows room for a larger marketing budget.
• Your business math needs to be good and then you can spend what you need to spend on marketing.
• Evaluate your email-only campaigns and think of other medias you can use in addition to deliver that message, such as: text message, Facebook ads, and direct mail.
• In terms of cost, the least expensive media is direct mail and there isn’t a lot of competition.
• The Facebook ad is a way to deliver a message to prospective customers as well as to those who have expressed interest, but who haven’t take action.
• Use Fix Your Funnel Sync to segment people in your database and the Facebook pixel to identify people who have expressed interest in your service or product.
• Use a text message to initiate conversation.
• How do you think about your customers and prospective customers? You should think of them not in terms of dollar signs, but as people. This will change how you communicate and help you to develop longer-lasting relationships with your customers.

Transcription of Episode

[00:00:00] Hey, it's just you and me. You can be honest. Are you an email addict? We're presented with a marketing problem. If your first answer involves an email sequence, then you might be an email addict. Well, this condition is destructive and can lead to stress of customers and prospects. There is hope and that's important to know.

With our first training company that my brother and I put together that we used Infusionsoft with, we relied heavily on email. In fact, that's how we were able to generate attendees to our trainings that would then buy our products and then become members of our service that paid us a subscription. That was all done with email, so I know a lot about email and I know a lot about what works and what doesn't work with email. I've run the gamut, believe me, but it's a different time and back then there were really many options beyond [00:01:00] email.

Today you really don't have the same excuse. So if you're addicted to email in your business, it's time. It's time to start building a more dynamic list of prospects and customers. You need to enrich your media selections to deliver your message. That means not relying just on email. Email can be a central part of your campaigns, but it can't be the only way that you deliver your messages. I'd like to introduce a few other medias that you should be considering.

Now the problem with these other medias is they carry a perceived cost. What do I mean by perceived cost? Well, we look at email. We tend to think that it's free. We don't take into consideration that a bulk of what we're paying for when we get something like Infusionsoft is actually email deliverability. It is one of the banes of Infusionsoft existence because it requires so much attention from them to make sure that the emails get out and get delivered.

In fact, a lot of their reputation seems to hang upon this single nail and because of [00:02:00] it they even made the mistake at one point of talking about their service being an email 2.0. Email really isn't the deal, it is a deal. It is a media, and you want to be thinking about some others.

The other point is when you send a message to a prospect or customer, the message has a cost. It is the cost of attention.The more messages you send that are sloppy and maybe not thoroughly thought through, the more you spend on the attention side. Attention can be worn out or spent very quickly. So when you send a lot of emails, the other problem that you commonly make is to get sloppy in your messaging, and sloppy messaging in emails kills customer prospect attention.

The other problem we have today is that email inboxes are bombarded. Bombarded so much that big companies spend lots of money trying to develop solutions to deal with it. This is why you have Google inbox.

Google created [00:03:00] Gmail and they had great success with it, but then what happened is people were so overwhelmed with what they were getting, that they were not very happy about having a Gmail account. This creates bad association for Google. So Google had to try and fix that. And their solution, which was quite ingenious, was inbox.

If you haven't used inbox, I highly recommend it because a lot of your customers are probably using it as well, and inbox makes it very easy for you to ignore completely marketing messages as well as update messages from people sending you emails.

Now, why did so much effort go into dealing with the email inbox? It's because it's an unpleasant experience. People don't love it. In fact, most people hate it. The only emails that they're really, really want to get are emails that tell them they just got money and the same is true for you.

So if you're dependent on email and you're addicted to email, you've got a problem! And if you start dealing with it now, you might actually have hope.

So let's start to talk about how we actually improve it. Well, the first thing to do, and this may seem strange, [00:04:00] is, I said enrich your media selections for delivering your message, but even before that you need to make sure that your business model allows for a larger marketing budget.

I would actually focus my first attention on looking at my business model. Is my business model optimized to provide me with the larger marketing budget I need to be able to spend money to deliver my message? If it's not, work on that first, because anything else you do will not really solve the problem. Your business math has to be good. If your business math is good, then you'll be able to spend what you need to spend to deliver your message. And that's the bottom line. So get that fixed first.

Now, once you've done that I want you to start evaluating your email only campaigns and start thinking about other medias that you could use to deliver that message.

Some of my preferred media is to use, in addition to email, not to the exclusion of e-mail, though I do send a lot less email than I did with that initial business with Fix Your Funnel, is text message, Facebook ad, direct [00:05:00] mail. Direct mail carries the most cost so it's used sparingly and only in the most appropriate situations, but it's extremely effective because there's not much competition going on right now in your mailbox.

The next one in terms of cost is the Facebook message. I should say Facebook message through the Facebook ad, but I think about it as a message. I'm able to put in the timeline of my prospects or customers my message. Sometimes that message is to get people I've never seen before to do something, but more frequently it's to deliver a message to people who I know have already expressed interest, but maybe haven't taken a specific action.

I use a tool called SyncSumo to be able to segment the people that are in my database and I also use the Facebook pixel, which I mentioned in the very first episode of this series, to be able to identify people who visited certain pages on my website and then be able to segment them to deliver different messages as well.

The final media that is beyond email is [00:06:00] the text message. I only use the text message to initiate conversations in my personal campaigns. Sometimes we'll do some notifications, but I'm principally looking at ways that I can initiate conversations when I use text messages in automation. So here's a few different ideas to help you hopefully get over your email addiction.

I want you to evaluate your customer relationship paradigm as well, because the way that you see your prospects and customers changes the way that you communicate with them. And if you see them as just moneybags, you're going to communicate with them differently than if you see them as people, so I want you to think about how do you visualize, how do you see, how do you think about your customers and prospects and, depending on how you see them and how you look at them, you're going to change the way that you communicate with them.

Currently if you're very heavily addicted to email, chances are that's very tightly associated with the way that you see your customers or because you are unaware that there were other [00:07:00] medias to use.

If it's the latter, hopefully this will help you spur some ideas for how you can start communicating in a more humane way with your customers and your prospects so that you can actually develop deeper relationships that will create a longer and more stable business, and when I say longer, longer lasting and more profitable more stable business regardless of what industry you're in. This is Ryan Chapman with Fix Your Funnel. Keep moving forward.