So the tools we’re going to talk about today are email marketing.

Email Marketing Training Webinar

We’re also going to talk about offers and promotions, doing feedback and surveys, live online polls, web based survey, events and registrations, and more.

You know we’re going to talk about Facebook promotions, social campaigns. So a lot of really great digital marketing tools that all work together. We have all these tools at constant contact.

They’re all there in your account waiting to be unleashed, we have a whole tool kit package where you get to use all these things starting out at just $45.00 a month.

The reason I mentioned the price right up front is because I think after you hear all of these, you’re going to assume they are really expensive. The reality is they are incredibly affordable and the turn around investment is unbelievable.

So marketing engagement has evolved. They’ve evolved a lot. Forty years ago, if you had an ad in the newspaper, I read it and I know that I read it because forty years ago, I read every page in the newspaper front and back every day. I can’t remember the last time I did that.

Later if you could afford it, you could do TV commercials. And if I was watching a television program, I had to watch the commercials, I was held captive.

Well today we have TVO’s and DVR’s. 92 % of us don’t see the commercials anymore. So today people communicate in a lot of different ways. Some people are on Facebook, some on YouTube, some are on Pinterest. A lot of people are on Facebook. Most people do email so the reality is we have to communicate in different ways.

People engage in different ways today and it’s all about engagement. Today is step by step engagement marketing. We want to impress them when they come into our business, knock their socks off, we want to encourage them to engage with us on social and other platforms.

When they talk about us, we get greater social visibility. Think about this for a minute. Who is your very best prospect? It’s somebody just like your customer.

Who do your customers hang out with? Who do they network with? People like them. So when they forward an email to their friends and they talk about their purchases on Facebook and we know that more than half of the people that buy something, talk about it on Facebook.

That’s instant combination from their friends. I mean 14 % of us today trust advertisement. 78% of us trust online recommendation. In from a stranger, when someone within our network, that can be as high as 92%.

Now the core of all of this store means email and if you’re like me and you read everything, a few years ago, you might have read that email was dead. I read that too. It was a quote from a famous person that got picked up by all the media. Ironically, where did I read it? It was sent to me in an email.

That quote was from Sheryl Sandburg the COO of Facebook. So maybe there’s a conflict of interest. I mean, if I want to sign up for Facebook I must have an email address. If I want to communicate with them, it’s through email.

So, I don’t’ think it’s quite dead yet. In fact what I do know, email is still growing at 7% a year. It’s the core of all other forms of marketing. It had the highest return on investment of any form of marketing in the last year. $39.40 for every $1 invested. The highest of any form of marketing. It’s how you tie all these things in together. Most importantly, it’s how you monetize social media.

I’m never going to follow you on twitter if all you tweet is “buy my stuff”, “buy my stuff”. We tolerate almost 0 promotional content on social media. But we do tolerate some promotional content via email. In fact, we often look forward to it. I want to see the really cool deals and neat, new stuff that’s arriving at my favorite store, my favorite vendor, my favorite service and I look forward to that email to see what’s in it. So 95% of us in the United States do email and we do it every day on the average we check it 24 times per day.

Small Business owners up to 66 times a day. We’re pretty obsessed with it and if you’re a fine print reader, you say, “wait a minute”, that’s 18-64. My prospects are under 18. Okay, under 18, it’s not their top communication tool, texting is but under 18, the number one reason they get an email account and an email address is not to join an online network but is to buy stuff online. So it’s a smaller group that’s a really powerful golden group. 65+ If you think they don’t use email, you’re just wrong, sorry. Its 65, you think well, they don’t do email.

At 65, email is the number one reason they buy a computer. Think about it. At 75, they don’t hop out of bed and say, “I want to master PowerPoint so I better buy a laptop”. At 75, they probably don’t have to have the best period, but at 75, they go get a laptop because they want to communicate with friends and family and emails how they do that today. And we can prove this adoption of email on our mobile devices, tablets and smartphones. More than half of us, about 53% of us are now doing email on our phone.

The fastest adoption group is 65+, 67% of 65+ are now doing email on a tablet, a mobile device of some type, a smart phone, just today, instead of buying a computer, they’re just buying a smart phone or tablet. Again, the top return of investment on any form of marketing, $39.40 for every dollar invested and I would say, that that’s not realistic because most of us that the emails that get in our inbox, they’re not that good,

A lot of companies are still doing email marketing very poorly so if that’s the average turn around investment on poor email marketing what happens when you do it really well? Well then it’s astronomically high. It’s through the roof.

So we’re going to spend just a couple of minutes on emails best practices. First, More than 60% of us decide whether to open an email or not based on who it’s from. Now, so the from line is incredibly important and if you think that there’s not much to it, there’s really two pieces to the from line. There’s the from name and the from email address. Now, if you use outlook, you see both.

I send it to you in outlook, you’ve got my from name and then a bracket to see my email address. Not everyone uses Outlook. It’s not the most popular email client or email software. More people still use America Online webmail than use Outlook.

American Online webmail drops off the from name. It only displays the email address. Other email clients do the opposite, so both pieces of your from line, independently standing in case you’re only seeing one or the other, they better clearly indicate who it’s coming from. If I send it from a really big company, and my email address is [email protected] and that’s all you see, you’re not going to open it. So both pieces, clearly standing, I better know who it’s from.

And to, I’m going to recommend you do your own domain name and not a yahoo or a Gmail, but actually buy your own .com, your own domain. This costs about $7 a year. It gets opened more. Additionally, something coming from a real name @ something.com gets opened more than if it comes from something generic list dot or news dot. Even if they have no idea who that person is. So, there’s a lot of things you can do here. 60% decides just on the from line, 30% percent decide by the subject line and they’re only going to spend a couple of seconds on it. So the ideal subject line and today, it’s hard to get ideal. You won’t always hit it but the ideal subject line, get as close as you can and it’s got to be concise. So I’m going to recommend 30 – 35 characters or less and that includes spaces and don’t just count the numbers and throw commas and stuff out the window. If it gets shortened, truncate it on a mobile device. Will it still make sense? Or does it become something silly?

My favorite example; I can’t mention their name, I’ll get sued but last year from Neiman Marcus, I got this email and it said winter fashions you can’t afford to miss. In my outlook inbox that says winter fashions you can’t afford. That might be truth in advertising. It’s nothing that is intended. So if your subject line gets shortened, is it still going to make sense? The ideal subject line will have the brand in it again, even if they saw it in the from line. The ideal subject line is short and has a call to action.

Why should I open this right now? And sense were being very concise today, the ideal subject line is “you wanted the big secret” the behind the scenes professional secret subject line to get opened the most every time. Those are the ones that tell exactly what’s in the email. There’s the big secret. I did a lot of work with YMCA News to help them with their marketing and their email open rates had dropped down to 8%. Subject line was you know, YMCA News. Everyone’s was YMCA News. We changed that to YMCA:

Three spring swim tips. The rates went up 86%. So again, real simple. Stay away from cute and clever. Cute and clever often backfires. You don’t know the mindset of your audience of the time of received. If my dog gets sick, nothing is cute or clever. I’m not going to open it or I might not get it. I might not be as cool and clever and hip as you are. Now when are you going to send it?

The audience states, I love middle of the week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and my two favorite times are 10:30 in the Morning and 3:30 in the afternoon. The reason I like that, I think spammers must work nights and weekends because I go in on Monday morning and my inbox is full and there’s stuff in there I’m kind of interested in but I’m so busy I have to defer it till later. When I come back later, I’m just so busy, I just delete all that marginal stuff. So you want them to arrive at a time where you can spend some time on it.

Where it’s going to get their attention. And that’s going to vary by business. If I owned movie theaters and I wish I did. I’m going to send out late Thursday afternoon before they spend it somewhere else. And on Friday, I want them to buy the ticket to my movie.