Email Marketing Kung Fu
by Mike Adams
Published on this site: July 14th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
Have you ever heard email described as, "the killer Internet
Application?" Do you understand why email is the killer
app for your business on the Internet, or how to make it that
way if it isn't now?
In my spare time, I teach WingTsun(TM) Kung Fu. I learned
Internet marketing by marketing my martial arts schools and
classes online. Much of what I've learned about Internet marketing
- and Life - has been strongly influenced by Kung Fu.
Good Kung Fu is concept-driven. Good Internet marketing should
be, too. Have you ever heard the concept, "The best defense
is a good offense?"
My students and I are nice people. But if you've ever had
to defend yourself or your family, you know you can't be too
nice. Your survival, or the survival of your loved ones, depends
on you winning. You cannot stop, you must win.
So let me ask you: If you were in a situation where you had
to defend yourself and your family - life or death! - would
you only hit once? Of course not. You'd keep hitting until
you and your family were safe, wouldn't you?
But is that how you market your business on the Internet?
Are you relentless? Do you win? Or do you just get one hit
per visitor? Do you really think people are going to wait
around to see what happens? Or come back later for another
hit?
It sounds funny, but this is what the vast majority of businesses
do on the Internet! I've done it too, and I KNOW better! Any
marketer will tell you it's a known fact that it normally
takes multiple exposures to your marketing before someone
actually makes a purchase. It's so easy to focus on getting
a hit on your web site. But what's the chance you're going
to win with just one hit?
Do you know what it costs you to get a visitor to your web
site? Maybe you can measure it because you're doing pay-per-click,
popup, or banner advertising. Or maybe you just know you spent
umpteen hours hunched over your keyboard sweating blood trying
to optimize your pages for the search engines. Any way you
count it, I'm betting it's costing you a lot of time or money
for each visitor. Do you really want them to just surf in
and surf out, never to be seen again, and never to generate
any revenue?
Are you going to crawl back in every Monday morning to a
job you hate? Your family would be a lot safer if they didn't
have to depend on the good will of an anonymous corporation,
wouldn't they?
Are you going to win?
Are you an Internet Warrior?
Then you have to get their email address, and permission
to email them. Then we start our Kung Fu.
I'm going to teach you the concept of the WingTsun chain
punch. The chain punch is like a machine gun - it's a continuous
chain of punches, each one linking to the next in a continuous
unbroken chain. They just keep coming! Believe it or not,
with a little practice anyone can punch 7 or 8 times a second
for 100 punches or more. In fact, 10 punches per second is
not that difficult and 12 punches per second is not unheard
of! And every one of those punches is automatic, it's reflex.
It's all on autopilot.
That's what your email newsletter can do for you. It's your
kung fu chain punches. They just keep coming until you win!
Now I want to be sure to specify here that we're not talking
spam - we're talking permission marketing. We're talking about
emailing to people who've subscribed to your newsletter from
your web site.
Good self-defense is simple. There's no time to try to do
complex, memorized sequences of dozens of movements! You just
need a couple simple things that really work when the chips
are down and that are pretty hard to screw up.
In the WingTsun Kung Fu that I teach, chain punching fills
the bill. You learn it pretty much day one, then you do about
a thousand a day for the next 40 or 60 years! Of course it
will work, you know it as well as you know how to walk!
We're going to do the same thing with email. Here are
the concepts and simple steps of Kung Fu Email Marketing:
- The primary job of your web site is to get a visitor to
give you their email address and permission to email them.
You need to prominently feature your subscription mechanism.
The mechanism can be as simple as an email link, a form
they can submit, a popup/popunder/popover, or whatever.
Just get the email address. And be sure to tell them what
you will do with it - you will send them your newsletter,
ezine, occasional special offers, or whatever. It doesn't
hurt to tell them in plain English that you're not going
to sell their email address to a bunch of spammers either.
And be sure to keep that promise! Since people are getting
pretty protective of their email addresses, it may also
be a great idea to give them a good reason to subscribe.
Maybe you can give them a free ebook or report, or a free
trial of your service.
- You want your email newsletter to earn your subscribers'
trust and respect, turn subscribers into customers, and
customers into repeat business. You need to send your newsletter
regularly forever, earning trust and respect the old-fashioned
way, and never letting your subscribers down. You can do
this manually, but I recommend instead doing at least most
of it with a sequential autoresponder. There are a number
of good ones out there, and you can either go with one hosted
on someone else's servers or you can run a script on yours.
That's it, you've now taken your first lesson in Kung Fu
Email Marketing! What, did you think it would be hard or something?
C'mon, this is just Internet marketing, not Kung Fu fighting!
Mike Adams has been doing WingTsun Kung Fu since
1980. You can learn more about his WingTsun Kung Fu schools
at: http://www.dynamicwingtsun.com/
For more of Mike's Internet marketing tips, tools, news, articles,
and resources, visit: http://www.timberway.com/
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