Marketing Hard Without Marketing Hard | An Advanced Online Tactic

Ever felt worried about marketing too hard to your prospective customers?

If you have an email list, how many emails is too many? Are you annoying, or illuminating, with the number of your blog posts?

In the offline world, it’s harder to feel as though you’re overdoing it. A large percentage of flyers are considered ‘destined for the garbage’ before they’re even sent out – the cost of doing business. So when 1% of flyer recipients gets mad, you brush it off and just keep on mailing.

In the e-world, it’s a bit different. Precise measurements allow you to see exactly how many people unsubscribe at any given time. Did you send out a ‘risky’ email with no content, and just a promo? Maybe two in a row, even?

Depending on your relationship with the readers, you’ll likely get a few unsubscribes.

So, what’s a great marketer to do? You believe in your offerings so you keep marketing. And, you measure, watching for the negative tipping point – 10 unsubscribes and 100 purchases? Sounds fine to me. Oopsie, 100 unsubscribes and no purchases? An overaching downward trend in your list numbers? It’s likely time to pull back a bit.

But there are actually a few alternatives to the above, one of which you can dig into here.

Instead of sending an email out to your entire email database yet AGAIN, send a few to a couple of segments instead.

What does this mean, exactly? Perhaps promoting your $97 offering to the segment of your database that’s already bought at the $25 level. Or, instead of blasting your whole list with your newest $500 seminar, send out to just your $250 buyers.

You can slice and dice your list in other ways too. In fact, how about we make a list?

5 Easy Ways to Segment Your Email Lists So You Can Market Hard Without Marketing TOO Hard

(i) According to price, per above.

(ii) According to product:

A special email to buyers of book #1…about book #2 makes sense, because you know they are book buyers. How about Volume II of your CD set to those who bought Volume 1? Or a teleseminar on ‘How to use a Tell-a-Friend Software’ – to those who have used yours? Kinda logical once you start thinking about it.

(iii) According to occasion:

“As a one-year anniversary of you graduating from X offering, I’m sending a follow-up invitation to take that foundation and (insert new benefit.)”

(iv) According to geography:

“I’ll be in St. Louis on November 1, 2006, won’t you join me for a special local gathering?”

(v) According to lookie-lou status:

This is probably my favorite segment. Lookie-lous are tire-kickers, folks who like to take advantage of your freebie offerings, whether they be free teleseminars, mini-ecourses, weekly group coaching, etc. Yet, they never seem to buy, or at least not yet. If you have a way of segmenting out your lookie-lous, consider a targetted email just to them that markets a low-priced offering pretty hard.

Because once you start thinking of your customer database NOT as one gigantic monolith but as pockets of people in clusters, you realize you can say things differently to different folk, depending on where they are in your funnel.

You’ll find It takes off a lot of the ‘pressure’ of sending multiple mailings to your main list, and begins utilizing those cool little lists you have stored in your shopping cart or email manager. (You wondered what all those mini-lists were good for, didn’t you?)

[Side note: If you've just started building your list, you may not have as many opportunities to segment yet, but you will.]

Put it simply: You’d send a different set of email to a small list of left-handed golfers than a list of just plain golfers, yes?

As Perry Marshall likes to say, “Enter the conversation in the mind of the customer.” “It’s about relevance.”

Specific, very relevant, relevance.

So try micro-izing your list – you may be surprised what’s relevant to each slice. As your mindset shifts, it makes the day-to-day marketing a whole lot easier. [Look at your various segmented lists and ask, who shall I write something to, today?]

It’s worth it. Besides, in most cases, your conversion rate will be higher, and that means big marketing results…with less angst.

Stay tuned for more tips and recommendations on how to market hard without marketing hard (get big marketing results without becoming one of ‘those’ marketers) in future posts.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more ways to build your list, both monolith AND segmented, so you can begin implementing the above, give our actiion ecourse a look-see.

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