Email Marketing – 3 Tips
Peter Brissette • December 15, 2018
Hello everybody. Welcome to this month’s Marketing Message. Peter Brissette here, digital marketing dude talking this month about email marketing. And kind of like this idea of three tips. So this is kind of my kick right now is three tips, and talk to you about marketing emails. So let me just share my screen here so we can look at this. So we’re talking in email marketing. All right, three quick tips for you.
The first tip, email is still an effective tool for marketing. Probably the biggest question you have. Should we even be using email as a part of our marketing? And the answer is yes, it’s still the number one most used means of communication, in particular for business related transactions, for people engaging in communication. So still an effective tool. Are there other tools that you could think about and possibly see if you could work into the mix? Absolutely. More and more people are using the communication via social media platforms, those chats systems. But ultimately your goal should always be to get people on your email list.
I talk often about the two things, really three things that you own. One, you own your messaging, your brand, and who you are and what you do. Number two, you own your website. So you should always make sure that that’s up to date. And then number three, you own that email list. You own that. So it’s worth building that list. So whatever other marketing you’re doing, you should be moving people over to your email list, so you have some means of communication with them that you want.
The second tip is that you must have a plan. So you must really think about how am I going to use this to communicate? Is it in a regular monthly newsletter to existing clients. How am I getting prospects and how am I going to communicate with them? How can I use this as a productivity tool to actually get more done in my day? How can we use it effectively with our teams? There’s so many aspects to how we can use email and being able to actually automate and systemize elements of the business, in particular with marketing, client onboarding, and even new staff onboarding. Email can be an effective tool to help you accomplish that.
And then the third tip is choosing the right tool. So you really have to choose the right platform that’s going to be right for you. My personal favorite at this moment in time, it has been for a little while now, is Active Campaign. So it’s an email marketing tool, it’s an email automation tool. It’s also got a contact manager, so a CRM system in it as well. It’s a sales tool. It does an awful lot and it’s very reasonably priced and works with many other systems out there. But it doesn’t matter which tool you use. So find the tool that you want to use. If you’re just getting started and you need something to pick from. MAILCHIMP is free for up to 2000 contacts and it works with just about everything and it can be an effective tool as anything else. So those are my three tips that I wanted to share with you here this month on email marketing. I hope you found that useful. Please like, comment and share. Sharing is caring. And look forward to next month’s marketing message. Have a great one.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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