Email newsletters don’t work. That might be an unpopular opinion- but it’s true! Email newsletters are poor marketing tactics, simply because your inactive buyers don’t care about your new features, your recent wins, or your stellar hiring decisions. They simply don’t care about your news. This isn’t a recent change. Email newsletters have never been a good tactic for the reasons I explained. But email marketing can be your most powerful tactic. The difference? Well, it’s the content, of course.
Why email newsletters don’t work
Flip your perspective just for a moment. Become one of your prospects. Imagine yourself finding your company for the first time. You might be curious, but you’re not even considering buying anything right now. Why would you — as a prospect — be interested in receiving updates about this company’s product features, the company’s recent wins, or the company’s amazing or stellar new hiring decisions? You wouldn’t care. That’s why email newsletters don’t work because your prospects don’t care how great your company doing.
Prospects who meet your ideal profile client are wrestling with issues that you know how to solve. Why do you know how to solve them? Because you’ve focused on the problem and have deliberately chosen a market who has the problem that you’re good at solving. They are deliberately matched if you thought your strategy through carefully enough. If the prospects you have targeted were ever to have that problem, then maybe your product features, services, staff might be interesting, but right now, they’re not. So you have to trouble them first…
What are your prospects really interested in?
If your market’s untroubled right now, they’re not interested. But they are interested in your insights into the problem, when it presents, how it presents, why it presents. This is really valid to them.
So, instead of sending email newsletters that only talk about how great your company is, what you want to do is to get together a long list of all the possible angles that you can talk about the problem you solve for your audience. I’ll show you how.
How to use email marketing to engage with your prospects
- Agree the problem that you’re going to focus on. Get Sales, Marketing, Finance and Operations to agree what problem you solve better than any of your competitors.
- Then, list five causes of that problem. What are all the factors that lead to this problem coming about in the first place?
- Then list five triggers. A trigger is an event or an action which suddenly brings this problem to the surface, where the cause might have been present, but until the trigger fires, it’s just not an A priority issue.
- And then, list five consequences of the problem. What are things that will happen as a result of that problem firing?
- Finally, share these insights widely. In that example, you’ve just identified 15 really useful insights into one problem, and all of those insights are worth sharing.
Your email marketing needs to lead to an asset
Each of those 15 insights can now become 15 blogs. Those 15 blogs can be posted on your website and all of the social platforms that you invest time in. You can email these blogs to your list. But whatever platform you’re using to communicate that blog, when you actually write the blog itself, always write it to lead to an asset. This is key.
Don’t just add in a good call to action at the end of the asset. Identify the call to action before you even write the blog so that the blog itself is leading inexorably toward that asset. Think about all the factors that you can mention along the way that can be tied together at the end, that are going to make sense and will make the person want to receive the asset.
Take our own marketing as an example
In our case, our asset for this blog post is Funnel Plan. As a part of the work needed to generate content for your email marketing, Funnel Plan is an online tool that your team can use to:
- Identify the problem that you most want to focus on. Then, after you choose the problem, you need to identify the strategy that flows from that – Funnel Plan help you with that too!
- Identify what kind of market most has that problem. And therefore, who in that market you should be communicating with. As well as, what sort of market doesn’t have that problem, and therefore, who you shouldn’t be focusing on so much.
- Identify what product or service is going to solve that problem. Then you need to shape your offer, your solution. So, certainly at a strategic level, you need to buy in from everybody to the problem and to the strategy. But also at the tactical level, by what means will you get your market troubled about the problem? And all their questions are answered with the help of Funnel Plan.
Funnel Plan helps you wrestle all of those questions. It gives you great videos on how to think about them, places to answer those questions and then a way of distilling them and communicating your answers in Funnel Plan. If you’ve already got a Funnel Plan, you know all that. If you don’t, go get one now. Get yourself a Funnel Plan and wrestle all those questions together with your colleagues
I’ve got loads lined up for you for next week, and until then, may your funnel be full and always flowing.
Our thanks, this week to:
- You for watching this week’s show,
- Lisbeth Peña for blog production
- John Ang for video production
- Hugh Macfarlane for scripting and presenting this week’s show
