| Whether you contribute to your firm's e-newsletter or write your own blog, you will find these email marketing principles from Ian Brodie to be helpful. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- If I had to give up every marketing tool in my arsenal - apart from one - the one I would keep would be email marketing. Without a doubt. Ask any successful professional what the most important element of their marketing is and the answer will almost always be some variant of "follow up". "Keeping in touch", "relationship building", "being top of mind". People don't hire us to perform high value services for them after the first meeting. We've got to build trust and credibility. It's follow-up that does that. And email marketing is the only form of follow-up marketing you can do "en masse". Do it right and you can build credibility and trust with large numbers of people with just a little work and by pressing the send button. Nothing else comes close. That's why, when the Direct Marketing Association evaluated the ROI of different marketing strategies, email marketing had almost double the ROI of it's nearest competitor. Yet so many professionals either don't do email marketing, or get it so badly wrong they don't see any results from it. Here are the three simple principles I've found to be the real foundation of effective email marketing. 1. Email marketing is about relationship building not selling Of course, every now and then I'll promote a training product or one of my services in an email. But by far the biggest "win" I get in business is if someone calls me to ask if I can help them through my coaching, consulting or training services. So my email marketing is geared to build the credibility and trust needed for people to feel ready to make that call. 2. Email marketing is about me and you Most email marketing seems like it's been written by faceless corporates. It puzzles me why so much email marketing feels so impersonal. Perhaps there are marketing agencies out there coming up with this crap and convincing their clients they need to sound "professional" or have a newsletter filled with fancy graphics. It just doesn't work. What works best is if your marketing emails read just like your normal emails. You're writing from you as a person to them as a person. That way they read them properly - and not with their "oh oh, I'm being sold to" shields up. 3. Email marketing is about delivering REAL value Your potential clients have a huge dilemma. They have big issues and opportunities in their business they need help with. But before they hire you they need to know you have the true expertise that will deliver results for them. You need to prove it in advance. How can you prove you can get results for them. Well, you could claim you can. You could offer a guarantee. You could show them your qualifications or awards. Or you could show them testimonials from your satisfied clients (assuming they believe them). Here's an alternative: deliver real value to them in your emails that allows them to get results before they ever hire you. There's no better proof that you can get results by working with them than a demonstration of your sound advice. Ian Brodie is a business development consultant and blogger. You can read his blog at www.IanBrodie.com and sign up for his free "power tips" here.
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