Category Archives: Email Marketing

Setting Up Joint Ventures

Setting up joint ventures for your clients can be highly lucrative both for them and for you. Let me explain why but first let’s talk about what I mean by a joint venture…

One of the fastest ways for a business to make rapid sales and profits is to get another business to promote their product and service to their customers.

This can lead to a huge influx of new customers and if the joint venture partner promoting them is chosen well they’ll be high quality customers too.

JointVentureThe business doing the promoting either gets a percentage of the sales created (like a commission) or gets their business promoted in return (a type of referral exchange).

This can be as simple as setting up an online sales page of some kind for the business then creating an email for the business doing the promoting…both services you can provide and charge for.

In fact you can charge for everything including finding and suggesting businesses to do joint ventures with (even if it involves going through the business owner’s address book to see who he already knows who might be open to it).

If you’re using the Offline Gold Army system then you can feature this service in your newsletter and offer it to every business who joins.

Now you might pick up the obvious stumbling block here.

Many businesses don’t keep email lists of their customers. That’s not as big a problem as you might think…in fact it’s a potential opportunity for you as a consultant.

First you can always send a snail mail promotion because businesses that are selling higher ticket items or services keep mailing addresses.

Second you can offer to help these businesses set up an email list…

This is where helping businesses set up joint ventures gets interesting…it’s a great way for you to pick up new clients for yourself because you’re positioning yourself perfectly as a marketing expert with some really cool, fast, minimal cost profit making strategies.

Every time you help to set up a joint venture for one of your clients you’re also introducing yourself to a potential high paying client for yourself.

So you get a win in multiple ways.

Following Up By Email

After you’ve made your first contact with a prospect how do you follow up?

First, understand that following up with good prospects and clients is crucial if you want to have a business with a steady income.

You might think that your brilliantly designed direct mail piece should convert every prospect into a paying client.

Or you might think that the business owner you met at a business networking event will be calling you some time soon…after all he obviously liked you and he has your business card.

Or that well crafted, personalized email you sent…he couldn’t possibly ignore that.

Let Me Introduce You To The World
Your Prospect Lives In…

He has dozens of different things going on at once. He is, after all running a business.

He’s dealing with customers and employees. He has deliveries, bills, sales people, vendors and delivery drivers calling on him.

At the end of each week he has to pay out salaries…at the end of each month rent and a whole pile of other expenses.

Sure he might have met you or read your email or your letter. He might even be really interested in what you have to say.

But in most cases he’s so busy you’re
not even on his radar yet!

He’s moved on and even if he was interested in what you might be able to do for him he’s expecting that you’ll follow up with him (every other sales person and supplier he’s bought from followed up so why should you be any different?)

That’s why it’s absolutely critical that you think through your follow up process.

If you have an email address that you know is good you can follow up by email and you can do it very effectively.

The real secret is heavy personalization, appealing to your prospects wants and needs and positioning yourself as an expert (or as the connection to an expert).

I cover the kinds of follow ups you can do in detail in the report 25 Different Ways To Get Paying Clients with quite a few examples.

You can use online video, you can use an email, you can use screen shots of your prospect’s website or copies of his advertising or almost anything else that will get his attention.

See page 70 of the report 25 Different Ways to Get Paying Clients for ideas. Also some clever marketers have worked out you can adapt the series outlined in pages 50 to 55 very easily to email and that sequence can be VERY effective.

If you’re going out of your way to offer really useful information that’s customized to your prospect and his business and you make multiple contacts that way you’re going to dramatically increase the number of prospects who contact you.

You’ll also massively increase their perception of you as an expert
and potentially increase the fees you can charge…

Also think of using other media as well as email. Snail mail, phone calls, and in person calls are all amazingly powerful…especially if your plan is to share valuable information with those contacts.

If the first words out of your mouth are something like: “I was thinking about you and your business and I had an idea that might be valuable to you…” or “I read this article today on [topic] and I had to share it with you” or “I just finished a new report on [topic] and my first thought was ‘this would be great for [prospect’s name] and his business.'”

If you’re targeting a particular niche with your services then having an effective follow up system is crucially important because it’s a large part of positioning yourself as the go to marketing expert in that niche.

Effective follow up tools like lead generating reports and direct mail pieces is something we do when I work with you in the exclusive, customized niche yourself service I offer.

Take the time to think through who your prospects are, what’s important to them and what information you can share with them that is truly useful to them and you can design your own follow up system.

Then you just have to use it consistently.

Towns With No Search Engine Traffic

What should you do if you’re in a small town that doesn’t seem to generate any search engine traffic (based on keyword searches you do)?

First you should know that getting traffic to a website is just one of a whole pile of strategies you can use for a brick and mortar business and NOT the most important
strategy.

For most businesses building relationships with their customers and prospects and following up with them is going to bring them the biggest return.

One obvious way to do that is with email marketing.

Think of how many people walk into a brick and mortar business in a month and what it would be worth to that business to capture their contact details and follow up with them automatically.

Here’s a video that explains the concept in a little detail…

The product From Offline Store Front To Online Gold sets out an out of the box email marketing strategy in detail.

Also most businesses are not using a whole range
of marketing strategies you could introduce to them…

Generally speaking the fast profits in a business are in improving their sales process and follow up…not in trying to bring in new business.

After that there’s usually good profits in creating referral systems (that can be done in a whole pile of innovative ways even with businesses that don’t ever usually ask for referrals).

If you’re having trouble understanding how you can help businesses without SEO then you should go study some marketing fundamentals.

Anything by Jay Abraham is great. You could also read my ebook Online Gold For The Offline Business.

When you grasp some simple marketing fundamentals you’ll be amazed at the opportunities and possibilities you see everywhere for helping businesses make more sales and profits.

Most businesses are not even scratching the surface of what they can do to:
# Turn more prospects into customers
# Get customers buying from them over and over
# Getting customers to buy MORE from them and
# Getting customers to send them high quality referrals.

Many of these things you can do or enhance using the internet with some quite simple skills and strategies.

And because you’ll be making the businesses you work with real profits often quite quickly it can be very lucrative for you AND your clients.

 

Finally don’t trust keyword search results. I have plenty of clients making some serious money with traffic from long tail search terms that don’t show up in any keyword tool and probably never will.

Some keyword phrases might only be searched for half a dozen times in a month but someone searching for that keyword phrase might be a highly qualified prospect worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to the right business in the right area.

Those types of keyword phrases are like gold.

They take no real work to rank high in the search engines (one page of targeted, quality content will usually do it) and they can keep bringing in high quality customers to a business for months and years to come.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

Free Email Marketing…?

There are many different ways of getting clients. Some are very effective…some can set you up for failure in subtle ways.

Here’s question I received today:

“I have come across an offline biz model whereby you approached offline biz owners that have a pg1 google position but do not capture site visitors email etc, and offer to set them up with an effective list capture/opt-in system (inc. free giveaway, autoresponders et al). This allows them/us to build a relationship with people in the market to buy at some point, so hopefully some can be turned into paying clients. Apparently, this works best with higher value goods & services.

“Do you consider this to be a viable biz model?”

My answer:

Follow up marketing is incredibly powerful and will often bring the highest return for effort of any strategy you can implement.

In fact I cover email marketing for retail businesses or businesses that have a lot of foot traffic in the product From Offline Store Front To Online Gold. We also have a whole pile of resources and threads on email marketing in the Gold Members section of OfflineBiz.com.

This video might give you some insights…

Most businesses don’t understand that it is very expensive to attract new clients but costs very little to follow up with prospects and customers they already have…especially by email…and especially using an automated email autoresponder system.

My first recommendation would be don’t do it free.

Clients who don’t pay you are likely to be problematic. You haven’t forced them to establish the value of your service in their minds by charging them a substantial fee upfront.

They will tend to undervalue your service and they have no real commitment to making any strategy you implement really work. When they’re paying you they have a whole lot invested and they’re far more likely to get you and their staff behind anything you do.

Also if you charge upfront for doing something you’re getting paid and that’s the whole point of doing this gig in the first place.

Many people think “free” is attractive to businesses but often it’s more of a red flag to a business owner (as it is to you if you think about it).

When someone offers you something free or really cheap your first question is “What’s wrong with it?” That’s NOT what you want your prospects and clients to be thinking about your service.

The opposite is also true. When someone is charging a premium fee your immediate reaction is usually “he must be good…look at the fees he’s charging…I wonder what’s so special about his service?”

Charge a substantial fee upfront before you do any work on anything. That would be my first rule of charging.

The other problem with providing an email marketing solution free is that email marketing is complicated and takes a lot of work to do well.

You need to create a good incentive for people to join a list (maybe a lead generating report and some kind of compelling email series).

And if the list is going to have any size you’ll also want to use a premium autoresponder service like Aweber.

So there’s a really substantial cost in money and labor in doing email marketing well. It’s just not something you want to be doing free.

Another big mistake many marketers make when they first start serving brick and mortar businesses is focusing too heavily on what service THEY will be providing.

By trying to sell a specific service you’re putting your service first instead of the needs and
wants of the person you’re communicating with.

If you really want to be charging premium fees you need to focus on getting to know the business and its owner, what’s important to them, what problems they need solved.

Then you customize a solution around that.

That will help to build trust and rapport and it ensures that you’re actually delivering a service that is highly likely to get some results based on real knowledge of the unique ins and outs of that business.

Making that first contact with a business can be awkward but in my opinion offering a free service is probably not the best way of doing it.

There are multiple strategies you could be using in the Offline Gold product Get Clients Now.