All those salesy emails last week

You mighta noticed, but there was quite a lot of salesy email being sent in the last week. The whole Black Friday / Cyber Monday thing has everybody doing big, massive offers and sending them to their email list.

And, as you no doubt noticed (unless you’re a Lab member), I was doing the same thing. While most of what I send to you guys is real content via The Daily, over the last week I was pushing pretty hard on the sales side of things.

And, I’m not gonna BS you…

It isn’t exactly my favorite thing to do. I don’t like pushing sales that hard, but sometimes it is just part of doing business.

But, there’s a couple of things that come to mind on this. Not just for me, but for any of us doing email marketing. And it is especially for those of you who feel a little uncomfortable when you push sales offers out to your audience.

The first one could easily be summarized by a Facebook post I happened to notice from one of our Lab members. She doesn’t know I’m about to point this out, but Denise said…

“I’m happy all these marketers I haven’t heard from all year are hawking their BF/CM deals so I can unsubscribe from their list.”

Hehe… I get it, Denise. 🙂 See, it isn’t as if merely sending out these deals is a bad thing and causes unsubscribes. It is that those marketers Denise is referring to have not been doing their jobs. They haven’t been in touch regularly. They haven’t been sending out anything of value. They come out of relative silence and start barraging their subscribers like Denise with “buy my stuff” emails.

The motto here is…

Always continue to EARN the subscription of your email subscribers by keeping in touch regularly and sending them cool stuff. By doing this, you are earning their attention and, hence, the right to make offers to them.

In this blog post, I talk about what I call the RPF Triangle. RPF is Relevance, Personality and Frequency. If you run low on those 3 points, your subscribers won’t want to hear from you. If you expand on those 3 points, they won’t mind and, in fact, will actually look forward to your emails.

Now, the second point here…

I think it is best summarized by Gary Vaynerchuk’s phrase (and book) on the jab, jab, jab, right hook. It’s the idea of giving value, value and more value… then come in for the sale.

I believe it was Derek Halpern, from Social Triggers, that I once heard say… “I don’t sell often, but when I do, I sell hard.”

This is the attitude that I take… and that I recommend for everybody with email lists.

There comes a time when you go into “sales mode”. Most of the time, you’re delivering helpful content. Done correctly, even that helpful content will lead to a sale. But, there eventually does come a time when you just go into “sales mode” and you sell hard. The point is to get them to make a decision.

You never want to be afraid to sell hard… as long as it is a great offer, in your prospect’s best interest, and you’ve earned the right to do it by delivering value to them first.

So, to summarize…

1. Always deliver value to your email list so as to EARN the right to make an offer to them.
2. When it does come time to go into “sales mode”… do it and don’t apologize for it.

To that end…

I’m still sorta glad that the whole Black Friday week is over. I got a lot of promo emails, too, and I was also sending them.

We had a lot of people join The Lab this last week… and I look forward to welcoming you guys into the community. For everybody else, we’ll be here when the time is right for you. In the meantime, I guess I hope I didn’t annoy you too badly with all the promos. 😉 It’s over now. But, now you know where I’m coming from with it.

Oh yeah…

In Friday’s Daily, I talked about how we’re going to do a series on performing a content audit on our blogs. I didn’t forget about it. 🙂

If you want to know how you can raise your blog traffic by deleting blog posts, then stay tuned. 🙂

– David