If you are not building out an email list, you are leaving money on the table.
And if you have an email list but are not regularly engaging with your email subscribers, you are leaving money on the table.
Listen to this episode to learn why email marketing is so important, has the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel, and a preview of my new free ebook to help you understand best practices in how to "do" email marketing right.
Download my free ebook, The Definitive Guide to Email Marketing, here:
https://nealschaffer.com/email-marketing-guide/
Key Highlights
[01:54] Introduction to My Newsletter
[03:04] What I Realized About Influencer Marketing
[04:34] My First Ebook On Email Marketing
[05:18] How Email Marketing Benefit Your Business
[05:25] Choosing the Right Email Marketing Software
[07:17] Why You Have To Build An Email List
[07:46] Email Marketing ROI Example
[09:11] Another Data Point
[09:35] How To Know the ROI of What You're Doing
[12:06] Podcast Data Points
[12:42] How to Engage and Build Relationship With People?
[14:46] How to Build Email List
[16:08] How to Leverage Sequences
[16:38] Keeping It Human
[17:31] Make Every Email A Love Letter
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
If you are not building out an email list, you are leaving money on the table.
And if you have an email list but are not regularly engaging with your email subscribers, you are leaving money on the table.
Listen to this episode to learn why email marketing is so important, has the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel, and a preview of my new free ebook to help you understand best practices in how to "do" email marketing right.
Download my free ebook, The Definitive Guide to Email Marketing, here:
https://nealschaffer.com/email-marketing-guide/
Key Highlights
[01:54] Introduction to My Newsletter
[03:04] What I Realized About Influencer Marketing
[04:34] My First Ebook On Email Marketing
[05:18] How Email Marketing Benefit Your Business
[05:25] Choosing the Right Email Marketing Software
[07:17] Why You Have To Build An Email List
[07:46] Email Marketing ROI Example
[09:11] Another Data Point
[09:35] How To Know the ROI of What You're Doing
[12:06] Podcast Data Points
[12:42] How to Engage and Build Relationship With People?
[14:46] How to Build Email List
[16:08] How to Leverage Sequences
[16:38] Keeping It Human
[17:31] Make Every Email A Love Letter
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Talk to anybody. Ask anybody. they'll all tell you if you want to be successful in marketing today, you have to have a list. You have to do email marketing, it generates the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel. Find out how you can up your email marketing game. On this next episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick tocking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here. Welcome to well, the your digital marketing coach podcast, I am your digital marketing coach. And I am always excited to have a new episode for you on a topic that I have not talked about in a while. But I'd like to bring it up again today, which is email marketing. And I'm gonna take a little step back. I'm actually, in the process of creating my newsletter, I send out a weekly newsletter every Friday, make sure if you're interested in hearing about my latest updates, as well as recommended reads from around the internet that I find over the course of the week, make sure you go to my website, Neal Schaffer calm and just find some place where you can, you know, put in your email address and subscribe. But I want to read you the introduction to my newsletter for this week. And it's going to be a great introduction to the topic I'm going to talk about today. So I took a big risk this week. See many of you know me as being an expert on LinkedIn from my first two books windmill networking, understanding, leveraging maximizing LinkedIn, and maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing for those that might remember, some of you may think I'm an expert on social media marketing strategy for my groundbreaking book maximize your social this podcast used to be called the maximize your social podcast. Or maybe you know me as the influencer marketing expert writing the definitive book on the subject, the age of influence. This podcast then became known as the maximize your social influence podcast before it became its current iteration of the your digital marketing coach podcast. But I want to let you know that it was really after writing the age of influence, and that was released on March 17 2020. Think about that timing for a second. And the pandemic that came immediately after writing that book that shaped my current thoughts on digital and social media marketing. See, a lot of companies read that book, and reached out to me wanting help with their influencer marketing. However, based on their business objectives, I realized that influencer marketing wasn't the only way in which they could reach their goals. And in fact, in some cases, it might even be the best choice. In fact, with the post patois, I guess we could call it the pandemic. And now, sort of the post quasi post pandemic economy, what is old, SEO, email marketing, etc, was new again. And while a lot of companies were chasing after the shiny new object, they literally did not have their digital house in order. That is when this social media marketer started focusing more on digital marketing and seeing new value, new perspectives in things that others had forgotten. Maybe it was a fresh perspective that I was bringing, but I realized tremendous value in things that businesses were just not prioritizing. This experience has shaped all of my consulting, blogging, and podcasting since then. It's why I have rebranded this podcast, your digital marketing coach podcast. Yes, I talk about social media marketing strategy. Yes, I talk about influencer marketing. But there's more than being successful in digital and social media marketing, just that there's SEO, there's email marketing, I want to be able to share all that I know about all these subjects to you. And that's why I'm so happy I changed the name and the branding, because it gives me the freedom to do so. And to also let you know that you want to be able to pick the best solution for the problem that you have. So now, I'm really excited to release my first significant ebook on an aspect of digital marketing that I feel is extremely undervalued email marketing. It's called the definitive guide to email marketing, how to generate the highest ROI from digital marketing. If you are already on my list, you probably got an email if you didn't, I will put a link in the show notes. Make sure you go and download this book. It is completely free. It is, you know, I don't know, 3540 page PDF, it's pretty meaty. And just to give you an idea, and I'm going to tell you the why I decided to write an email marketing. But just to give you an idea about what's in the book. Obviously, I talk about, you know, email by the numbers, because the stats are really compelling. What exactly is email marketing? You probably already know that, but just in case, how does it benefit your business, and it benefits your business in more ways than you might think, Getting Started by choosing the right email marketing software. I think there's only a few really, really good choices in the market. I mean, there's tons of choices, but I find that my clients are either going to an active campaign or if they're a solopreneur, entrepreneur, content creator, that ConvertKit and some small businesses do ConvertKit and some entrepreneurs do active campaign, but I see those two, email marketing software's really getting a lot of market share. I think that mailer light as a very, very inexpensive solution is also eating away share from MailChimp as well. But anyway, you can read the eBook for more information on that. How are you going to communicate how you're going to segment your list, how to build your list through lead magnets, like this ebook on email marketing, how to create effective communication pathways, social scoring, advanced marketing automation, how to optimize your email marketing, to KPIs, and then top tools for email marketing, not just email marketing software, but other auxilary tools that might come in handy. So here's the thing about email marketing. It was a speech that I saw Joe pullets, he talks about Joe Politzer, being the godfather of content marketing, this next episode, after this one, I just finished interviewing Joe Pulizzi today, so make sure you hit the subscribe button. I'm really excited about this next podcast episode. But it was a stat that he had, I couldn't find the original tweet. But he said that ProBlogger, who is a blogger, that 98% of his business, didn't come from his blog, it came from his email list. And at the end of the day, everything else you do is on rented land, social media is rented land. If you're trying to get better search engine rankings, it's rented to YouTube, Apple podcasts, it's all rented land, we don't own it, the only thing we own our own websites, more importantly, our own email lists, right, which give us direct communication. And that's why everyone's advice is always always, always build a list, have that direct communication channel open. And I'll tell you. So as you know, I'm a fractional CMO. And I've seen it time and time again, the ROI of email marketing, I want to give you just a sample. Now, this is one client, they are an E commerce company, they have an e commerce Store, you can also purchase their product in retail and on Amazon. But basically, the ROI of their email marketing, and we track everything in Google Analytics, they get the equivalent of six figure Google ads, ROI with email marketing. In other words, when we go to Google Analytics, the sales generated from their email marketing is the same, very similar, I should say, as the amount that's generated from Google ads. But here's the thing, they invested six figures in this Google ads, the amount the investment, email marketing was monthly campaigns, and the cost of Active Campaign, which is a few $100 a month, you can see the fundamental difference in ROI. And just like when you have a website, and you're creating more and more content. And we could say the same thing on a podcast and YouTube as well. This is content, it's gonna live forever in the search engines. It's out of your control, but you're building asset. And so they're still investing the same amount of Google ads. But now this year, the sales and email marketing are already up, compared to Google ads by 20%. Case in point, they continue to build your list. They continue to develop a deeper relationship with their customers, their customers continue to open their emails, and they continue to act upon what those calls to action are. I want to give you another data point. So in addition to my fractional cmo consulting, I also have a mastermind called Digital First, you've heard me talk about it before it started as a group coaching program, really, it's turned into a mastermind community. And part of the flow, it's now open for general membership, by the way, but until now, when it was in beta, I was only allowing people who went through an application process to participate. And as part of that, you know, how do we know the ROI what we're doing? Well, one easy way to do it is through a survey to ask people. So as part of the application process, I was asking people, What were their touch points with me? How do they know about me? How do they know about digital first, and differ? Why would they apply? What were the touch points? So here's the thing. I've talked about this lat you know, I'm very active on social media. I'm like a verified user on Twitter or on Facebook, not an Instagram. That's a whole other story. But I have, you know, hundreds of 1000s of social media followers, I published a lot of content on social media, there's a lot of linkage going back to my website. But as you know, from a previous episode, and I did a calculation, this time, the amount of traffic coming to my website, from search engines, is 55 times greater than what is coming to my website, from social media combined, right? So social media plays a role in the brand awareness at the very top of the funnel, but at the end of the day, they're not buying anything that I offer on social media. And yes, I know, there's some smart aleck saying, hey, what about shoppable pins and shoppable posts on Instagram? Yes, that exists, don't get me wrong. But in general, the people that are investing in that program, they are coming to my website. So of the people that applied to my program, two thirds of them, that was their primary touch point, they had been to my website, they had read some of my blog posts. Now they could have come to my website from social media, but chances are, they came from Google, they came from search engines. That's the ROI of SEO. But 57%. And once again, there's multiple touchpoints, 57% of these people were on my email list, they came because they saw me mentioned it in my email. And that, my friends is huge. Because once again, they may see us on social media, they may not they may see us in search engines, they may not they may come to our website, they may not. But the email, we know that we can get in front of people, right. And when we get in front of people, we need to be strategic about how we do it. But if we are given the privilege to directly communicate with people, that gives us an opportunity to deepen the relationship on our timeline, rather than the timeline of an arbitrary algorithm, like a search engine, or a social network. If you're curious, what about the podcast? Well, 20% of the people were podcast listeners, 23%, had actually read one of my books, the ROI of being an author, you don't make money on the book sales, you make money on the business that comes from people reading your book. And knowing liking and trusting you 14% of the people applied came from see me speak at an event. And 6% were already my customer for a different product or service that offered over time. So after web, email number two, right, it just speaks to this ROI. And if you think about it, I talk a lot about this next work that I'm creating this book Digital First, you know, how do you design engage with people? How do you build relationships? How do you build community generate business? In general, it's either through search, through social, or through email, email, is that fundamental in the success of your digital marketing. So that's why I thought, similarly, when I wrote the age of influence, I realized there was a gap in the market marketers were being misled on what influencer marketing was, they were missing out on an extremely impactful way of developing business of developing influential relationships of developing community. I think today, I can say the same thing about email marketing. Companies immediately want to go to social media, when they haven't done their SEO, when they haven't done their email marketing, or they're not doing marketing automation, they're missing out on a golden opportunity. And they are trying to invest more in rented land instead of in their own assets. So there is a lot that goes into successful email marketing, I'm not going to go through everything in this episode, that really wasn't the intent, right? It was to give you that mindset that I have to get you to hopefully, go to the link in the show notes, download the guide, because I think it's really going to help your business is one of the ways in which I think I can be impactful do this podcast to help you. So I already went through sort of like the table contents of what the eBooks about. Obviously, it begins with investing in the right tool. As I said, ActiveCampaign ConvertKit, mailer light, those are three really, really solid choices. There's a lot of other tools out there for using one of them keep doing it. I have found these three to be both the most powerful and the easiest to use and providing me analytics and other things that I don't have to pay extra for which some platforms charge. But just invested in email marketing software is not enough. You have to give value. How are you going to build that list? How are you going to build your following you have to provide value. My investing time in creating ebook is my way of giving value and yes, there's other ebooks I'm going to create now. This is only the first I have a few that I've planned for the year, because I want to provide more value, you need to then think, how are you going to communicate. This is in the e book I call communication pathways. This is something that I struggle with, I currently have different tears for people that are on my list, those that are the biggest fans, they want to get, you know, whenever a new blog post, they want to know, they get fed a semi automated, well, it's actually completely automated. I call it the Daily Post, which comes it's triggered from an RSS feed, whenever I have a new blog post that I have those that have downloaded an ebook, they've obviously expressed more interest in my work in my content and wanting help, they go into a weekly email. And then there are others that may be found out about me through a webinar, or just signed up on a general form. Those go into what I call the monthly. So I have different cadences that I messaged people on and I see it as a funnel, I first want to get people onto my list. And if they end up in the monthly, I want to get them to the weekly if then the weekly. They don't necessarily need to go to the daily I think if I can keep in touch with them once a week. It's great. But now I'm trying to figure out well, how do I leverage sequences? How do I begin to automate and scale this, with instead of creating a weekly newsletter, which I'm still doing, I think I've talked about this before, how do I create communication pathways to lead people down a pathway, which makes sense based on the lead magnet that they download it to give them more information to build more like no interest, and to improve my conversion rates. So that's something I'm also struggling with. But it's something that I wanted to talk about. I also want to remind you about keeping it human. One of my clients, I looked at their abandoned cart emails. And it's clear that there wasn't a lot of thought put into what was said, we sort of sometimes take for granted the actual verbage that we use in our messaging, and it's critical. I have another client who, you know, on an Instagram post used, I don't know, two dozen hashtags, you don't see a lot of big brands doing that. Because, yes, hashtags give you more visibility. But from the consumer perspective, they may sort of devalue your brand. Now emails, the same emails personal. That's why I read you the introduction that I put in my email because I wanted to make it as personal as possible. I care. Getting back to my last solo podcast episode. So you need to find a way to keep a human. As Ann Handley said, you know, make every email love letter. If you can do that, you're going to be really successful, because people as easy as they can subscribe, they can easily unsubscribe to your list. Once you get all that down, then it's time to grow your assets. How do we grow it? How do we get more and more value out of it? Like my client had, this is where we get into more social scoring, advanced marketing, automations, giveaways, coupons, exclusive opportunities. There's a lot of different things we can do. But hopefully, my describing email marketing in this way, hopefully piqued your interest, and will encourage you to download that ebook so I can help you and your digital marketing, where I think I can be up the biggest help. I want to thank you for listening to this episode. If you haven't subscribed, make sure you hit that subscribe button. In a few days. My next episode is going to be an interview with the one and only Joe Pulizzi talking about specifically the Creator economy. The evolution of it where is it going? It's also my first episode where I foray into. Yes, web 3.0 meta and fts. I think you're really gonna enjoy the conversation. I think you're going to have some aha moments. And there is a special offer for those that listen for an upcoming event that Joe is hosting that I'm going to be attending and I would love to see you there as well. All right, everybody. That's it for another episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. This is Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.