Truth #2: Your subscribers are using throwaway email accounts
It’s the dirty little secret of email marketing:
everybody has at least one throwaway email address they
use to subscribe to email newsletters and announcement
lists, especially when they don’t know or trust the
company offering it.
Hotmail accounts are, by and large, throwaway email accounts.
Yahoo accounts are often used for the same purpose. Statistics
show that the vast majority of Internet users have at least
one of these accounts, and many users have several. And
today, large ISPs like Hotmail and Yahoo are actually *offering*
throwaway email account to their users to give them increased
email privacy.
Chances are, if you’re marketing to end users, the
majority of your email list is actually made up of these
throwaway email addresses!
Yet while subscribers are gladly giving you one email
address to send your newsletters and offers to, they secretly
have *another* email address that’s their REAL email
address. This is the address they use at work, usually,
or that they give out to close friends.
This is the email address they really read.
And this is the email address you want.
Because if you don’t get it, that throwaway email
address will eventually be tossed. There’s a 30%
turnover each year, across the board, with these email
addresses. This means you’re losing almost a third
of your email list every year! If your in-house email list
is vanishing right before your eyes, this is probably the
number one reason.
What you really want, as a high-integrity permission marketer,
is to earn the trust of your subscribers and give them
a good reason to volunteer their real email addresses.
HOW TO GET THEIR REAL EMAIL ADDRESS
There are no tricks, no shortcuts, no magic bullets to
this. If you want their REAL email address -- the one
they pay attention to -- you're going to have to EARN IT.
And
once you earn it, you've got something of real value:
their "permanent" email address. This is the
address that's least likely to change and most likely
to be read.
How do you earn it? Here's my four step procedure:
- Establish trust. At first, you'll only have their
throwaway email address. Honor that address by protecting
each subscriber
(don't sell or rent their emails, because permission
sold is permission lost). Don't slam your list with an
endless
stream of emails, and don't pollute your email messages
with overly commercial content. In other words, keep
it clean. You have to earn this trust, you can't force
it.
- Ask for their work email address. In every one of
your outbound emails, ask, "Is there a better email address
to reach you?" And provide a clickable link they can
click to go to your website and update their email address.
Be sure to flag these subscribers (the ones who actually
update their address) as "loyal" subscribers
who should be eligible for special invitations for
surveys, coupons, and so on. By giving you their new
email address,
they are establishing a high degree of trust with your
organization and, in a sense, sticking their necks
out a bit. Be sure to let them know they made the right
decision
in doing this.
- After you've established trust over time (6 - 10
weeks), send a special email campaign to your Hotmail.com,
AOL.com,
and Yahoo.com addresses. The entire message should
simply ask if there's a better email address they might
be willing
to offer you. Ask for a work email address. Offer an
incentive, such as a 10% off coupon on their next purchase,
or the
free download of a valuable report. Give them a reason
to volunteer their best email address.
- From an email campaign management point of view,
capture email bounces and keep mailing them anyway. Any
good email
marketing software will automatically capture bounces
(my own firm's software, Campaign Enterprise, automates
this
process). But don't make the mistake of thinking that
a couple of bounces means the person can't be successfully
emailed in the future. Their email account might have
been
full, or their POP server might have been temporarily
down. I recommend keeping them on the list until they
reach a
total of 10 bounces, at which point you should stop
attempting to mail them.
Follow this procedure and you'll
stave off the vanishing of your in-house email list.
It's a goldmine, after all,
and there's no use watching it disappear right before your
eyes. Get these procedures in place and you'll see fewer
bounces and BETTER RESULTS because now you're reaching
your readers, subscribers or customers in their best inbox!
You
may ask why I'm not doing the same right now. How come
I'm not asking you for your best email address? That's
simple: this is a five-part series. Once this series
ends, it simply ends. So this is a special case. But
at the same
time, I *am* establishing trust (I hope!) by bringing
you compelling content without a bunch of hype. And,
you'll
notice, your email address isn't being sold or rented
to anybody.
With this kind of trust in place, you're far
more likely to sign up for other 5-part courses I may
offer in the
future. (What I'm doing is demonstrating one of the many
uses of the software product my company sells, because
if I can automate this 5-part email course with Campaign
Enterprise software, you can use it in the same way to
automate an email course of your own.)
NEXT: FOOLED! WHEN
EMAIL MARKETING SUCCESS ACTUALLY RESULTS IN DISASTER
It's
one of the most common mistakes in email marketing:
using the "S Method" (revealed in the next email)
to get subscribers and, ultimately, new customers. At first
it seems like it's going extremely well... all the numbers
are up... everybody's happy. But then disaster strikes.
Nobody's buying! What happened? What went wrong? |
