Show Notes
Transcript
Welcome to the Custom Apparel Startups podcast, your best source for information, news, tips and tricks to get you off the ground running, and earn success with your custom apparel decorating business. So, get ready to soak up some knowledge!
Now, here are your hosts, Mark and Marc!
Mark S: Hey, everyone! Welcome to episode 31 of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. My name is Mark Stephenson, from ColDesi.
Marc V: And I’m Marc Vila, with Colman and Company. Today we are doing our third part in the trilogy of Making More Money Next Month. Today is Using Email For Profit.
Mark S: I’ve got to tell you, Marc, I have always wanted to be involved in a trilogy. I just really – it’s a dream come true for me!
Marc V: Dreams coming true every day, that’s what we try to do here!
It’s really important that we discuss this in this trilogy, because we’ve done two things now. We’ve gone out and created some active word of mouth. We’ve gone and visited some local businesses, gone to events. We have physically gone out and marketed ourselves as apparel decorators and small business owners.
Mark S: That was episode 29.
Marc V: Then, we also hit the phones a little bit. We called some of those folks. We called some people who were referred to us, or we were referred to them, vice versa. We called some folks that were potential.
Mark S: That hadn’t heard from us yet.
Marc V: They hadn’t heard from us yet, but they were within our niche, maybe, or within our area of town, and it was worth picking up the phone and contacting them. So, we’re building up a list.
Mark S: Yeah, and spots on your calendar, as well. This is not intellectual information that’s to be studied. This is stuff that you should be doing. We call these “How to Make More Money Next Month” for a reason, because we want you to do these things, so you make more money next month! Just hearing it won’t do that.
Marc V: You have to do it today, for it to make you more money next month. It won’t work, if you wait until next month.
Mark S: There should be a disclaimer, “How to Make More Money Next Month, as long as you do the things in this podcast.”
Marc V: Today, soon. Part of it is the email. We’re building up a nice little email list here. If we’ve gone out once a week, and we’re actively creating word of mouth, and we’re picking up the phone once a week – maybe that’s the schedule that you’re working on. Every week, you’re picking up new email addresses, as you’re getting business cards, as you’re getting referrals, as you are meeting new people within the organizations that you work with.
You work with a school board, and now you get another Principal’s email address, because they were referred to you.
Mark S: Let me just set this up for you. The most valuable thing you can do, of course, in business is make a personal connection with someone. Honestly, I think the next most valuable might be an actual sale. But that email address is so valuable!
I know that Colman and Company and ColDesi both spend a lot of money and a lot of resources and a lot of time, in order to get that kind of information.
Marc V: What happens is you get this, and too often, most of the time, small business owners get these email addresses, and then do nothing with them.
Mark S: Right. They don’t know what to do with them. There’s no plan to do anything with them, and they just sit there.
Marc V: Yeah. It can fall victim to the same thing as the phone number. You’ve got somebody’s phone number, but you don’t want to pick up the phone and bother them, or you’ve got a little apprehension about doing that. So, the business cards pile up, or they get lost in the ether, and you never do anything with them.
It’s important to take action with these email addresses.
Mark S: Agreed.
Marc V: We need to discuss, I guess two things in the thought process of this. One is, what do you do individually yourself, one on one with somebody, via email?
Mark S: Kind of as part of that initial introduction process, whether it’s in person or by phone.
Marc V: Other things are during sale and post-sale emails, directly from you or from the salesperson, or from a manager or whoever. Then, there is the larger scale. How do you market to all of your customers, via email?
Mark S: How do you use email to actually make more money separately from that initial contact?
Marc V: Yeah. We actually have a whole podcast on email marketing, we did many, many, many years ago.
Mark S: I can’t even remember what that one was about! I think it was email.
Marc V: Yeah, it was email marketing, which was a great one. So, some of this information will overlap. But this one is about making more money next month, so we’re going to focus more on the specific actions we’re going to take, to do this.
Mark S: Agreed. I think one of the most important things, for an immediate response and immediate profitability is what you said, and that’s what to do when you get back to the office after that day or morning of sales calls outside. Or you’re finished with your outbound calls, in trying to find new customers and getting in touch with referrals.
There’s something that you should do after every one of the those events, when you after somebody’s email address.
Marc V: What I would say is this. You’ve got to do basically two things. Well, I guess three, if I’m counting the very first one. The very first one is email them. That’s the first part of the action. You’ve got their email address. Send them an email. The rule on that is it’s got to be within recent fresh memory of the introduction, meaning if it’s not today, it’s tomorrow.
If you meet them on Wednesday, and you don’t email them until the following Monday, they’ve forgotten a lot of the conversation. They’ve forgotten what your voice sounds like. They forgotten what your face looks like.
Mark S: Or “Why did I give them my email address?”
Marc V: Exactly. You’ve got to do it within recent memory. Do it within 24 hours. That’s just the rule, 24 hours.
Mark S: I like that. That’s good.
Marc V: Sooner, better, but within 24 hours. Then, your goal of the email is one, to reconfirm the introduction. “Hi! My name is Marc. We just met. We talked about XYZ. I create this type of apparel. I do bling t-shirts, I do dancewear,” whatever it is. Remind them of who you are, even though you just said it.
Mark S: Hey, let’s do that a couple more times, though, because I really like this idea. I think it should be like “Hey, this is Betty. I’ve got the embroidery shop down the street. It was so nice meeting you today! If you remember, I do these things, and you said that it might be something you’re looking at. I just wanted to touch base through email.”
Marc V: The next one could be “Hey, I just finished chatting with you. I told you on the phone,” – that’s the other thing. Tell them you’re going to email them, so they expect it. “We just spoke on the phone. I told you I would shoot you a quick email, with my contact information. Look at my signature like. My phone number and email and website are all right there. Just as a quick remember, I handle all types of custom t-shirt creating and rhinestone t-shirts and caps and tote bags, and everything like that.”
That’s one part of it. So, one is send the email. Two is reconfirm the introduction. Then, three is to set the next action.
Mark S: Yeah. Honestly, guys, write this stuff down, because this is so valuable! Every email should be like this. Every communication.
Marc V: Every communication, almost, but definitely every email, I agree, should have a structure like this.
Mark S: For the call to action at the end of the email, you’re doing a couple of things. First of all, you’re preparing them. You’re letting them know two things; that they are going to hear from you again through email, most of the of time, but that you’re not going to spam the crapola out of them. Right?
Because if I tell you “You know what? We met. You said you were interested in doing something in April. I’m going to send you a note sometime in late March, just to make sure that we’re still connected.” Then, they know that they’re going to expect that, and not “Oh, my God! I’m going to get an email from these people every day now.”
You’ve kind of said “Here’s the expectation. It’s good one, and you don’t have to have that bad expectation that I’m going to bug you.”
Marc V: It’s a little bit psychological, and it’s also just friendly, to confirm what’s going to happen next. So, maybe what’s going to happen next is “I’m going to shoot you another email or a phone call, or I’m going to be in your area of town, and pop in sometime next month,” or “sometime this summer,” or whatever it might be.
Whatever it is, literally, just say it as light as it can be. It might be that you just met them. They are not interested in buying anything now. They don’t have a specific future date of when they’re going to buy again. All it is, is “Yeah. I might be interested in buying some t-shirts one day.”
If you’ve got that, that’s still fine. Reconfirm the introduction. Then, finish it with your next action. Say “Hey, I’ll probably just shoot you an email sometime within the next month or two, just to follow up with you, see if you need anything, remind you I’m around.” That’s just being honest.
Mark S: Absolutely.
Marc V: Literally, just tell them “I don’t want you to forget me, so I will just shoot you an email in the next couple of months.” That’s it!
Mark S: I like that a lot.
Marc V: There’s nothing wrong with saying that, and people will appreciate the honesty in saying that. Just like anything else, just like the outside sales, just like the phone sales, very, very few people are going to say “No, don’t ever email me. I don’t want that.”
Mark S: Yeah. They’ll just delete you. That’s all.
Marc V: And if they do say that, they probably weren’t going to be your customer, so delete them off of your list.
Mark S: Here’s what I like. I like the email as a component of the things that we’ve already talked about. Like you said, the first part of the trilogy, we talked about going out and meeting people in person. So, you can reconfirm that. At the end of this email, if you’ve done it that way, you might also say something like “Hey, you know what? I’m going to be back in your part of the neighborhood in about two weeks. I’ll probably just stop by with a sample or something, and to say hi,” which is great.
If it was a phone call, that you talked on the phone with this person, and they’re in your geographic area, then maybe your email says “Hey, I said I was going to send you an email. Here’s all of my contact information.” Maybe the call to action at the bottom is “By the way, I’m going to be on your street next week. Would you mind if I stopped in, if you’re going to be there? I’ll bring a sample of my work, to show you.”
Again, you’ve got the physical sales call and introduction and follow-up, and you’ve got the phone sales call and introduction and follow-up, and they’re both with email.
Marc V: It’s such a simple thing to do. What some people will think is “I don’t really want to bother somebody with emails. I get too many of them.”
Mark S: Right. I hate that!
Marc V: But what, Mark? What’s the obvious answer on that?
Mark S: My wife is a perfect example, because she hates emails. But you know, Gmail has a separate tab just for advertisements and promotions, and she spends every morning going through all of these emails on coupons and promotions and specials for websites she’s been to and people that she’s talked to, and things like that. She will complain about having to go through and delete 25 emails every day. Then, she’ll buy two things, within those couple of days, off of that list.
So, it’s really very common, and it’s very easy. The biggest and most successful companies on the planet use email marketing, and they communicate by that. Amazon, almost their entire business is based on email. If you are on the Walmart email list, you get all kinds of stuff. Any clothing or food retailer, coupon lists, just a huge amount of business is done through email.
Marc V: Yeah. If you shop at Bed, Bath and Beyond, if you shop at Bath and Body Works, if you shop at Macy’s, if you shop at Sears…
Mark S: Sports Authority, Colman and Company.
Marc V: Bass Pro Shops.
Mark S: Those people never leave you alone!
Marc V: I’ve probably named someone who has been in your inbox within the past week. Disney, cruises. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, save yourself from the emails! You’re going to get an email every hour!
Mark S: Unsubscribe right away!
Marc V: The point is that it’s because it works. Even though I don’t necessarily like closing my email, and then opening it and having 20, 15 of them being ads – I might not always like that. I might be annoyed by it, but I respond to it. I still do. I still buy things from it. You probably still do, too.
Mark S: Honestly, I can 99.9% guarantee that none of those emails that you have in your inbox are from custom apparel vendors. You know what I mean? None of your competition is sending their customers emails on a regular basis. I guarantee it. Because between all of the Colman companies, we talk to hundreds of thousands of people, and I don’t get those emails.
Marc V: I can’t think of the last time I got a marketing email, even by accident, from a customer that I should have ended up on the list somehow, and I wasn’t. So, it means that you’ve got the opportunity to set yourself apart by, one is the direct email. You are going to have some of your competition who is doing that. They’re going to talk to somebody, and then they’re going to send them an email. You’ve got to be a part of that game, to keep up.
Mark S: But you are going to do it a little bit better, because you’re going to use the structure that Marc talked about in the first part. You’re going to pay attention to all of that stuff. You’re going to write a nice email, and you’re going to have somebody else read it, to make sure the grammar and spelling are right, and that it sounds good.
Marc V: What about on a larger scale? Say I’m doing this every week. Every week, I’m getting ten email addresses, a modest number. I’m getting five new email addresses. That means I’m getting 20-25 every month. By the end of the year, I’ve got hundreds of email addresses.
Mark S: And that’s awesome. That’s when it really starts to pay off. Doing this first level email that we talked about will make you more money, because you’re going to stay connected more. People are going to buy stuff. We’ve already talked about how that works.
But once you have enough people on a list, to actually do marketing emails, that’s where the real money comes in. The first thing I would like is for everyone to stop right now and promise me – put your hand over your heart that you will never create an email to more than one customer, from the same screen, and use the cc field.
Marc V: Yes. You can’t do that, or the bcc.
Mark S: No. You can’t use your regular email software to send more than one email at a time, to customers. First of all, that’s one great way to get yourself listed as a spammer, because that’s the way they do it. Secondly, the deliverability is bad. If you have five customers on AOL, for example, and you’ve put all of their names in the To field, and you hit Send, then there’s a good chance that the next time you do that, AOL is not going to deliver your emails.
Marc V: Absolutely.
Mark S: They just don’t do it.
Marc V: It’s not something that we consider a lot, because most emails that we’re sending are directly to one person, one customer, one friend. So you’ll say “That’s never happened to me! I email my friends in AOL all the time.”
But now, you’re a business. Now, you’re sending a lot more emails, and you’re doing it more often. If every week, you’re sending this cc email to a bunch of different people; for one, you are invading the privacy of your customers.
Mark S: Because they can all see that, right? They can see that.
Marc V: Yeah. You’re sharing other peoples’ email addresses to other people, which is just not nice. It’s not friendly. It’s not good etiquette. And you’re increasing your chances of not being delivered, or being put into spam boxes, which then that’s a whole other problem to deal with. You might have to hire somebody, to get that fixed.
Also, there’s no way to track how it’s working.
Mark S: Right. If you send a regular email, you can’t track the thing like you can with an email service, which is what we’re going to talk about next.
Marc V: Yes. Let’s maybe talk about – what is an email service? Very brief. And then, what are you going to do? We have a whole podcast on it, so we don’t need to go too deep.
Mark S: Agreed. I’m going to mention the two most popular, the two with the best name recognition. That’s Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Constant Contact even has radio commercials in the Tampa area. It’s that common.
Basically, what they are is you’re hiring a company to manage your emails for you. What they do is they give you a bunch of templates, so you can create really attractive emails very easily. They kind of coach you along the way, on what works in email and what doesn’t. And they handle delivering those emails.
They keep track of who opened them, how many times they opened them, what time of day they opened them, and they help you optimize all of that. They also have the last feature, which is great. They put an Unsubscribe button at the top or the bottom of every email, so you’re giving your customers the opportunity to say “I don’t want this anymore.”
Marc V: Which is what you kind of legally need to do. It’s also a friendly thing to do. You should make email friendly, which means if you don’t want to get them, don’t get them. Delete them if you just want to delete them, or participate. But you give them basically those three options, in every email.
Also, the tracking is really nice. That’s where you have the opportunity to say “How many people read my newsletter every month? How many people delete it every month? And how many people are unsubscribing from my list every month?”
Mark S: There’s all kinds of things you can look at. Let’s say you decide to do a newsletter or coupons, or whatever it is. You can say “You know what? When I send out a coupon on custom t-shirts, only 5% of the people that I email to, actually open it. If I send it out on embroidered polos or caps, then 20% of the people open it. Guess what my customers are most interested in?”
Or “When I use a coupon that’s 10% off, or I use one that’s free shipping or something like that, I can see what my customers want,” and you can see that in numbers. The email software makes it really easy and clear to do that.
Marc V: You can test out ideas with your email. You can say “I wonder if I offer everyone free caps with the purchase of shirts?” You can write a little email. I think that as a small business owner, even when they’re little marketing emails, which means that I have a message I want to deliver to all of my customers. So, I’m going to go into this email software that I use. I’ve uploaded and inputted all of my customers in there, who have given me permission to do that.
That’s part of it, that you say “Hey, I’m going to send you some emails in the future. Is that cool?” You make sure that you are good with you doing that.
Then, you send messages out to them, and then you look at how those performed. You’re going to say “Well, I’m going to offer free caps.” So, the message is going to be “Get free caps with custom embroidered polos.” It could be very up front.
Louis CK is a comedian. He writes all of his own emails through an email service, and his are conversational, which is a great way to do marketing in one direction. His are “Hey guys! You’re my fans. Here’s a new episode of this show. You can buy it for $3 on my website. Here’s the link.”
You can make your emails like that, as well, if that’s the personality of your business. “Hey, everybody! I have a new promotion I’m running. I want to see how you like it. I get lots of requests for custom embroidered polos. For every ten that you buy, I’m going to give you a free hat. If you’re interested in that, click here!”
And it sends you to their website or it sends you to a form, or it allows them to respond to your email. Or you put your phone number on there, to call you. That’s one way.
The other way is to make it a little more formal, where its’ not a conversational email, but it’s actually an email that just says that. “Tom’s Embroidery Shop! Now offering free caps with polos! Brand new promotion for the spring of 2016! Call now or email, or click here to learn more,” or find out information, or to get your free hat or whatever it might be.
Mark S: I love that. It’s all really trackable. One of the best things is that most of them – I use Mailchimp and Constant Contact. I like Mailchimp, because it’s really easy. But the first 2,000 email addresses or something like that, are free. A lot of these email softwares are free to get started, for small businesses. And they’re not terribly expensive afterwards, so it’s not a huge investment in doing it.
Marc V: Yeah. You could have a really nice email list, and pay for all of the extra features and all of this, in these emails, almost all of them for less than a couple hundred dollars a month. It’s a low cost.
Mark S: Let me put it this way. ColDesi spends a couple hundred dollars a month, and we’ve got a huge email list. So, the money that you’re going to spend is negligible.
Marc V: On the high end – we’ve used high end software, really commercial custom program stuff, and we’ve used small business style software in the past, as well. Even on the high end, a massive fully, every single feature and custom everything, is still less than $1,000 a month. That’s massive scale stuff.
Mark S: Right. That’s Lowe’s. That’s Home Depot scale stuff.
Marc V: It’s massive scale stuff. At that point in time, you need employees to run it, it’s so big.
Mark S: You’re big, and you’ve bought a lot of equipment from ColDesi, which I love!
Marc V: Exactly. So, you can do this affordably, and you should do it affordably. But at minimum, you’ve got to start with the one on one interactions. Then, you should move into this. The point being, on using an email service like this, even if it’s 300 people, 500 people, whatever the number is, what you’ve got to do is remind them that you exist.
Mark S: Right. I want to point something out here. Let’s say you get to the point where you have 250-300 people on your list. Think about how productive we’ve talked about the active word of mouth is, going out and talking to people in person once a week, or however you decide to do it. Then, think about that phone time that you’re going to spend.
Between those two things, how many customers are you actually physically, yourself, going to be able to talk to? That’s the limitation of that kind of marketing, that email doesn’t have. If you think about email marketing like “Okay, I want to connect with my 200 customers and potential customers, today,” this is the only way that you’re going to be able to do that.
And it has all of that same kind of profitability advantage. If you email to 200 customers, how many of those are going to be in the market right now? If you email to 1,000 customers, how many of those are going to be in the market right now?
So, if you think about it like that, and kind of map it out, well, if I call 100 people on the phone, I’ll get an order, or I’ll get $1,000 worth of orders. If I can email 1,000 people, maybe with the click of a button, I can get that same $1,000 worth of orders, or more.
Marc V: And the longer you have your list, it builds up. Where I was going with it before was that part of what this is, is that people will forget who you are, especially when you’re doing this.
Mark S: Absolutely.
Marc V: When you’re doing these Making More Money Next Month steps of phone calls, in person and emails, in 30 days, a good chunk of those, say 50 people you met last month, are going to forget your name, the name of your company. They lost your business card. They threw it away, whatever it is. They forgot who you are, already.
Now, they need to order shirts. Don’t depend on them remembering who you are, and where your information is. That email can remind them, say every month, even if it’s just once a month, that you send out a little newsletter or a little reminder. The email can literally be a reminder of who you are and what you do, and a little story about one of your customers or who you did, or where you’re going, or an event that you’re going to.
Mark S: A picture of a shirt you just did.
Marc V: Yeah. Do that every month. All of those people, you’ve built up the list, and every month you could send out – you could call it a newsletter, you could call it a coupon. You could make it a deal, to say that you get free digitizing if you’re on this list.
Mark S: Yeah. “I’ll send you a coupon every month, I promise.”
Marc V: Yeah, and you could send them a coupon every month. So, follow up with your customers via email, every month
Then, the secondary part of that is, besides a mass style email, the customers that you have the best potential of getting more orders from; your top 10%, those customers. Like you meet somebody who owns a water company. They deliver water to businesses. They have ten drivers and four salespeople.
Mark S: High turnover.
Marc V: And they all have to wear these uniforms that are polo shirts with their company logo embroidered. You know that they are going to order in chunks, when they do events. And they’re going to order in singles, when they hire new employees. That’s a good customer that you then send personal emails to, every month.
Mark S: Yeah. You could do that.
Marc V: You could call them and visit them, as well. You could do all three. It’s important to do mass emails, but it’s also important, with certain customers, that you’re physically sending those reminder emails, from you alone. I think that’s a good thing, too, just like making the phone call or stopping in person.
Mark S: I like that a lot.
Marc V: You can template that stuff. You can write an email and copy it, and then send it to your top ten customers.
Mark S: Don’t forget to change the first name, though! Because I’ve done that before.
Marc V: Don’t copy that part, actually. That’s what I’m going to tell you to do. Don’t copy the “Hi,” “Hi, Charlie” or “Hi Juan.” They’re all very easy to write.
But you could write “Hey! Just wanted to check and see how you’re doing. I hope you survived this winter. It’s been a tough one! Springtime is here, and it gets really busy. If you need any custom apparel, remember I’m here to help you out. I do get really busy come April.”
Mark S: “Place your orders early!”
Marc V: There you go. I think that’s a nice little roundup there, of what you need to do with this Making More Money Next Month. The bottom line is you’ve got to send emails, and you should have good etiquette on them. I don’t know if we mentioned too much in that.
You mentioned about having somebody read it. You mentioned about grammar, and you mentioned about not putting the wrong name in there. All of those things are important.
Structure them well. Pay attention to what you’re writing, and do it!
Mark S: I agree. I think I kind of would like to break down a little bit, the most important parts, and some knowledge about what people actually read in an email, because I think that will go a long way toward people actually getting through to their customers.
Marc V: I think that’s a perfect wrap-up. This is actually what’s going to be in it, and why you’re going to do it.
Mark S: I agree. The first thing is, I don’t know if everyone knows actually, but everyone is subject to the Subject line. You make a decision when you get an email, on whether or not to open it, or to just delete it. And that decision is made on the Subject line.
If the Subject line of the email is, for example, “Free caps!”, if someone is interested in embroidery or caps or custom apparel, they’ll probably open that email. If the Subject line were “Tom’s Embroidery Promotions,” maybe not. Right? So, that Subject line is important. Everyone reads that.
Then, from that point, the reading of the emails breaks down considerable. They’ll read the first sentence or two, and they’ll read the signature line, and they’ll read the post script, the P.S. at the bottom.
What I’m saying is that the paragraphs that you write in the middle, all about your company, all about what you’ll accept for an order and what you won’t accept, and what you do and what you don’t do, all of that stuff does not get read.
They’ll read the Subject line, they’ll open it, they’ll read the first sentence. They’ll see who it’s from, if they’re interested. And if you have a P.S. at the bottom, that’s what they’ll read.
Marc V: I rarely write an email that’s more than five sentences.
Mark S: That’s what we’re looking for. Maybe five sentences, and a call to action.
Marc V: Yeah.
Mark S: Think about those parts the most. The P.S. is fun, because that’s where you can put your call to action. It can be “Hey, everyone! Here’s my email, my monthly newsletter!” At the bottom, “Hey, P.S., I’ve got some great new colors of shirts in! Go to my website and see!”
Marc V: “Now offering neon t-shirts,” or whatever it might be.
Mark S: Yeah, and “Click the link.”
Marc V: The same thing is true with written things as well, we might as well say. If you’re going to write a thank you note or you’re going to write a little letter that you’re physically going to mail to somebody, they’re going to read the top of it, – who it’s from -that first sentence maybe, the signature line and the post script. That’s it.
The big chunk in the middle is just -.
Mark S: It’s gone.
Marc V: You could just hit the F button on your keyboard a bunch.
Mark S: I get that all the time. “Mark, did you actually read that email that you forwarded to me?” “Well, I read what it was about. I knew what it was about. I thought it was for you, so I forwarded it on to you.”
Marc V: That happens all the time. I think that when you’re breaking this stuff down, write a Subject line. You should listen to the email marketing podcast, if you want to really get a big breakdown of this stuff. But the Subject line is going to determine if people are going to open it or not. So, think about what you are going to make the Subject line about, and what it’s going to say.
Don’t try to be tricky or weird, or too funny with it. Just nice and simple, and attention-getting is good. Then, make sure that the opening sentence or two convey basically the entire message of the email.
Mark S: Yeah.
Marc V: “Hey, we just met. I told you I was going to send you my contact information. Here it is.” Signature line, and “I will contact you again in a few weeks, as we spoke about.”
Mark S: “We met yesterday. I told you I was going to email. I sell custom t-shirts. Love, John. P.S. Here’s my website. Order shirts!” That kind of thing.
Marc V: That’s good enough. It doesn’t have to be complicated, because you’re just constantly reminding them that you’re there. You are following through with sharing information, whether it’s a phone number or a link to your website, or a picture of something They asked what a spangle shirt looked like, so you said “I’ve got some great pictures that I’ll email you,” and you do that.
That’s it! I think it’s easy and simple on the email side.
Mark S: We don’t want to make it too hard. We did a whole podcast on it. Honestly, our entire podcast series could just be about email marketing. It’s that deep. But it’s also that simple. What we just talked about, you could do this stuff, and honestly, just like the first two of the trilogy, which I still love saying, just like those first two podcasts, it will help you make more money next month.
Marc V: Absolutely.
Mark S: We’re not making this stuff up.
Marc V: Absolutely. If you start emailing your customers regularly, whether it’s one on one direct emails, or through the email service where you’re emailing them all at once, you will get somebody that calls you up and says “I just got your email. I actually need to order some shirts.”
Mark S: And honestly, it really doesn’t matter, and I personally don’t care whether or not you like email. It doesn’t matter. We all know people like this: Some people love to talk on the phone. Some people love to read articles on the internet. Some people communicate almost exclusively by email, and that’s me.
I only communicate by email. I never answer my phone. So, don’t discount an entire type of person that you might effectively market to, because you don’t like email.
Marc V: That’s actually a really great point to make at the end there.
Mark S: Thanks! I appreciate that.
Marc V: People often, especially in marketing and sales, will assume that because they don’t like something, it’s wrong. That’s not true. Just because you don’t like something, because you don’t like it, I don’t like something because I don’t. They might be completely two different things.
I have friends of mine that I am best friends with, that I haven’t spoken to on the phone. They live out of state. We haven’t talked in probably years. But we email and text constantly.
Mark S: All the time.
Marc V: I almost forget what their voices sound like. I have other friends that I will text, and then the response back is them calling me.
Mark S: Those are older friends.
Marc V: Those are older friends. So, it’s true of this. Email your customers. Go out and see your customers. Pick up the phone and talk to your customers. You should do it with your customers, you should do it with your potential prospects, and you should do it with folks you’ve never heard from or talked to before, as well.
Mark S: That are likely customers.
Marc V: That are likely customers. You will make more money next month and the months after that, because I’ll tell you what. We’ve said it a bunch of times in here. Most of your competition is not going to do those three things. But you are, which is why you’re going to do better.
Mark S: It excites the hell out of me, the fact that you guys might be more successful in the coming months, because of the last three podcasts we did. So, go back. Now that you’re done with this one, take action on the emails. Then, go back to active word of mouth. Then, do your small business phone skills podcast. Do your Using Email For Profit podcast again.
Put it all on your calendar, and then let us know at host@CASPodcasts.com, whether or not this stuff helped you make money, because I know it will!
Marc V: I would love to see you go on the Facebook group and say “I just went out and did my first active word of mouth sales calls, and I got a customer!” Or “I met five people that said they might buy from me soon,” which is five more than yesterday!
Mark S: Alright, I think that does it! This has been Mark Stephenson.
Marc V: And Marc Vila. Thanks for listening!
Mark S: Have a good business!
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