If you have ever wanted to stay in touch with your potential customers and convert more of them but were not sure exactly how to do it, you are in the right place.
The first thing you need to do is to start, update, and/or dust off your mailing list. If you don’t have one, it’s okay. We are all born naked. We all start somewhere. And if you have one but haven’t used it in a while, that’s okay too. We’ll get to that shortly.
Follow these steps.
- Open a free email marketing account like Mailer Lite or Send In Blue.
- Open a spreadsheet and put the First Name, Last Name, and Email Address of every person you have done business with or spoken to about doing business with since you were born. (This can be 5, 500, or 5k. It doesn’t matter.)
- Send them useful content.
It’s that simple.
For #2, If you have a database, EMR, or somewhere else that your past customers’ names and emails are stored, you can download that, too.
But What Content?
Stuff you know. You know things that they need. What is obvious to you is not generally known. Start with what question you have answered three or more times this week. Think of something your ideal customer needs to know and share that with them.
If you want to keep it really simple, you can even link to other articles you find interesting or useful and write a couple sentence commentary about it with a link. You are still the source of the valuable information. And in a world of information overwhelm there is huge value in curation of good material.
Send them another email each month, or a couple of times a month. It’s really up to you on frequency. There are a lot of opinions and “best practices” on frequency. But consistency over time is probably the single, most important factor.
You can always send offers, but you should really nurture and provide great content before trying to pitch them. The useful content to pitch ratio should be disproportionately tilted toward content. (“Before you shear the sheep you must feed them.”)
Tom Poland, in his book Marketing With Webinars explains his email strategy and objective as B.B.B.: “keeping your Brand in their Brain until they are ready to Buy.” They do not always need what you offer. But you want to be there when they do.
Do It
As with most things in life and in business, reading the book (or article in this case) is not enough. You must do. An idea without execution is without value. So, go back to the beginning. Click on the link to open your free email marketing account. Then create your spreadsheet. Then send your first email.
And if you cannot do these right now because the dog needs to go out, your spouse is calling you, or one of the kids has to be driven to soccer, put it on your calendar. Schedule it now and paste the link to this article in your calendar.
Then. Do. It.
Let me know how this goes for you.