Getting email subscribers is probably the best thing you can do as a bootstrapping entrepreneur. In fact, email is the #1 marketing channel consumers use to make buying decisions beating out direct mail, telephone, Facebook, text messaging, Twitter and Linkedin. This statistic as well as 8 other surprising statistics, is why email remains the best marketing channel to generate revenue for a business.
HubSpot is a company on the cutting edge of the inbound marketing industry. For those of you not so familiar with the term inbound marketing, it’s a methodology that focuses marketing resources on the process of being found by prospective customers rather than using marketing resources to go out and find customers.
HubSpot basically invented the term, so it’s not surprising that they are a leading provider of inbound marketing software as well as rolling out new solutions such as the Social Inbox.
One of the most undervalued marketing channels for entrepreneurs today is email marketing. The main reason for this is that the explosion of social media has made it easier for business owners who juggle marketing along with many other tasks to replace list building efforts with friending and following. This is a big mistake.
This week on twitter I came across a motivational quote that immediately connected with my soul. It was from the legendary hall of fame basketball coach John Wooden. The quote goes:
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
When it comes to building an email list, remembering this quote is critical. Not obeying the wisdom in this quote is probably the #1 reason all bootstrapping entrepreneurs don’t get started with building an email list so they can use email marketing to grow their business.
For seasoned entrepreneurs and marketers, it is a well known fact that email is still pound for pound the best way to deliver permission-based marketing messages. However, with the rise and dominance of social networking, many new entrepreneurs put building an opt-in email list at the bottom of their things to do list behind building a Facebook page, Twitter and Linkedin account. Although it is a much harder and longer process to build a quality list of opt-in emails, it is well worth your time. Below are some statistics that prove this fact:
With social media becoming the trendy way for entrepreneurs to communicate with prospective and existing customers, email has become somewhat of the stepchild of business communication. Simply stated, email has lost its sexiness with the rise of social media. As a matter of fact, reports show as much as a 60% decline in email usage among teens. However, I would argue that this is a good thing.
When I used to work in corporate America, there is one memory I will never forget. It was this project that ate up managers like they were a dozen lemon pepper wings on Super Bowl Sunday. One of the managers I had along the way, joined the project mid-stream and ended up lasting only a few months before he was let go. I believe one of the reasons he didn’t last long was embodied by a quote that he would repeat to the team every time something wasn’t going his way. He would say “you don’t know what you don’t know,” and he said it so often that you would think he didn’t know anything.
Every bootstrapping entrepreneur knows that they need to spend more time on their advertising strategy, but for one reason or another don’t. I belive the reason for this is that it is often expensive and time consuming to figure out the ins and outs of all the various ways you can advertise your business to drive new customer traffic in the door. Everything from pay per click (PPC) ads, banner ads, social media marketing, yellow pages, radio and television is offered up by pushy sales reps trying to convince you that their solution will provide a ROI. I say ignore all of this and focus on this: YOUR BEST CURRENT CUSTOMERS!!!
I was chatting with my mom over the weekend about how the different online advertising campaigns she was trying were doing for her business. She is the business manager and co-owner of a chiropractic wellness center in Georgia. What I heard made me cringe. She told me that the money she was spending on internet advertising wasn’t providing a return on investment. She also told me that after several years of trying various online advertising campaigns most of her business still comes from word of mouth advertising.
One of the things you will see me repeat over and over again in this blog is that getting an advertising campaign to go viral is both an art and a science, and therefore requires both left brain and right brain thinking.
We all know you can’t condense the “art” of making something go viral into a nice neat formula. However, there is a simple formula that explains the “science” of going viral.
