James Schramko here. I want to address the topic of email and if it’s still relevant.
You can get quite caught up with Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and maybe you’ve forgotten about the good old email. And you must wonder, you know, if you can so easily run an ad or retarget people, do you still need an email list?
And I would say, absolutely, you should have an email list. It’s not only a question of, if a platform is going to fail to perform at some point in the future. I would just say it’s a matter of when. We should be certain that the platforms that we’re using now will change. Think about MySpace, Alta Vista, or Netscape.
Some of the things that we’re going to be using in the future will be very different to now. But email is still very important. If you have the ability to contact your audience via email, that is one of the highest impact ways you can make sales.
Certainly in my business, when I want to make sales, I can send an email offer. And within 24 hours, there will be money in the shopping cart for whatever the offer was. Because I can reach my audience, they want to hear from me. And I can build enormous value by continually sending out information videos like this and podcasts.
So I believe email is still relevant, even if you only take your email list and upload it to some of these platforms as a custom audience, where you can start having really deep communications with your client across multiple channels.
So, keep building your email list. What sort of prompts me to answer this one is what sort of things can build an email list? Well, certainly you can give things away of high value. You could give away a copy of a book, or a course. You can give cheat sheets, transcriptions.
Generally, you need to do something a little bit more than just “subscribe to my email list,” which you might have been able to do 10 years ago, but it’s a little bit harder now unless you’re famous, and people already know about you.
And they’re coming to your site just to get on your email list, you know, like maybe Seth Godin, for example. But if you’re relatively new to the game, or you’re not so famous, you probably want to have some kind of incentive.
Most of the emails in my business are built off the back of my podcast and blog posts where we give away extra resources. For almost every podcast we publish, which is two a week, my team puts together a checklist or a guide, and at the minimum, a transcription, that people can download in exchange for an email.
And that’s how we can begin the relationship where we keep adding value. And when I do make an offer, if it’s to the right person at the right time, there will be a sale. So, keep building your email list.
I’m James Schramko. If you want to get on my email list and find out when we publish videos just like this, go over to superfastbusiness. com. You’ll see at the very top of the page, the option there to add your email address, and I will send you out emails when we publish podcasts and videos. And from then on, we can have a great relationship, too.
Speak to you soon.
Very true! Email marketing is the only platform where you can truly initiate a conversation with your audience.
Very true! Email marketing is the only platform where you can truly initiate a conversation with your audience.