Myth #1: E-Mailing My Customers Will Annoy Them

[This is part 9 (the final installment) of the series "Debunking the Myths of E-Mail Marketing."]

The number one thing I hear from business owners when I talk about email marketing is “I don’t want to annoy my customers.” Neither do I! And the good news is it’s REALLY EASY not to do this.

Permission-Based Marketing

Permission marketing is a term made popular by Seth Godin with his book of the same name. At it’s very basic level, it simply means you ask for and get explicit permission from people to market to them.

This concept manifests in many ways, but most poignantly in e-mail marketing. This is where the concept not only makes a lot of sense, but absolutely shines!

So picture this… you walk up to a person at a networking event and they ask you, “What to you do?” You tell them, “I am a small business accountant,” or “I help businesses with their Internet marketing,” or “We help homeowners going through life changing events to de-clutter their homes in order to cope better.” Then you ask “Would you like to learn more about what I do for my customers?” If they answer yes they have just given you permission to deliver your marketing message to them.

The same goes for electronic marketing. If a visitor on your web site enters their email in a form and clicks the button that says “Add me to your newsletter,” you can safely assume that they want to hear what you have to say!

So as long as you only add people to your email list who have given their explicit permission you will not be spamming them when you send out your emails.

Don’t Over-Promote

Another very important point is that you have to make good on your promise. The people on your list have said they trust you, and you need to protect that and respect it. You need to add value to their lives, not just sell to them. Nobody wants to walk into a place and get pounced on by a sales person. It’s creepy and annoying. Help people, they will learn to trust you, they will respect you and they will buy from you.

Once you have proven that you are trustworthy and have earned their respect, more and more people will want to join your list. Your list will grow… and you will do it all without annoying anyone.

Use the Appropriate Frequency

Emailing your customers every day is probably going to be too much, and you will definitely annoy them. Unless of course that is their expectation. For example you might offer a daily tip of some kind. As long as your subscribers signed up knowing that’s what they were getting, then it’s a perfectly awesome way to stay in front of them!

However, if you are offering a newsletter, you want to be more discerning. Besides it’s time consuming and unless you have 4 hours a day to write newsletters, it’s not practical. I personally send my big robust newsletter once a month. I know folks who send theirs once a week. Both are fine, do whatever you can handle and your customers want/need/will accept.

On the other end, you can’t wait too long between emails. Some of your subscribers, especially the new ones, will forget they signed up for your list if you wait three months to send them the next one. They may even think you added them without permission and report you for spamming them.

So be practical and respectful of your audience. Somewhere between twice a week and once a month is reasonable.

How To Annoy Your Customers

My definition of spam is “Repeatedly send people irrelevant, ad-filled junk e-mail without their permission and without giving them a way to unsubscribe.”  (Here’s the Wikipedia definition if you’re interested.)

You probably picked out the key components…
1. irrelevant
2. ad-filled
3. without permission
4. without an unsubscribe option

The bottom line is if you avoid all of these nasty things, you will be on the right track. Go for it.

Thank you for reading all 9 installments of this series. It was a lot of fun to write and I hope it helped you ignite your desire to do e-mail marketing. Truly it is the number one way to do effective internet marketing, and no small business should be without it in their e-marketing mix!

If you have any questions at all, just post a comment in the box below and let me know, and I’ll be happy to answer you. Or email me privately.

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Check out my new eBook, “The 3 Secrets of Online Marketing Success” which you can download for free at FreeWebMarketingEbook.com.

I suddenly caught a nasty cold yesterday so I’m going to make this short. Also, my brain is running on 3 cylinders so I hope it makes sense.

My New E-Book

I finished my new e-book yesterday. It took a lot longer than I had anticipated, but I learned some lessons that I want to share. These insights apply to any large project that you have a personal stake in, so even if you’re not planning on writing a book any time soon, hopefully you can take something valuable away from this.

It’s Never Going to be Perfect

One of the reasons the book took longer than I though it would is because I kept making revisions. I read it over and over, analyzing every sentence and paragraph, questioning myself. Is this clear? Will anyone be offended by this statement? Is this part relevant? Should I move this part down there?

I’ve read lots of e-books and many of them are terribly written. The content is good but the poor structure and grammar is so distracting the value is half lost. It’s really annoying to me, and I don’t want my book to be like that.

On the other hand, the minutiae I was focusing on got to be ridiculous. I simply lack confidence, having never written a book for publication before. So at some point, you just need to stop, and say, “It’s good enough.”

It Should Look Interesting

At first the book was just a text document in basic portrait mode and Times New Roman Font. It just looked boring, but I didn’t know how to make it look interesting.

So I went and looked at some other e-books that I had in my files, from people who I admired, and who are successful. There seemed to be a trend in the ones that appealed to me visually.

Most of the nice-looking ones are landscape format, with a wide margin on either the left or right. The margin contained snippets of interesting phrases or sentences from the content, kind of like the callouts you see in newspapers and magazines. It also contained a smattering of other nice visuals, such as diagrams and photos that enhanced the copy.

So I spent a day completely reformatting the book, and it made a huge difference. It was worth a day of my time to do that.

Include Some Promotional Information

This book is not going to make me a lot of money. That’s not its purpose. The purpose is to generate interest in my company’s products and services and attract new clients to my business.

In order to attract new clients, you need to tell the reader three things:

1. How great you are and why they’d want to do business with you personally.
2. What kinds of services you offer and how the reader can benefit from them.
3. How to contact you and/or get more information about you.

So there you have it. My three lessons learned about writing an e-book. If you have similar stories to share, we’d love to hear them!

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