Are you looking for ways to engage with your database?

Each Tuesday of the Sydney Business Month I am going to be bringing down experts from all online fields to talk about how they do business… and how you can too. In the Super Savvy Business Show we are going to focus on what you can do to grow your business online.

So today it’s all about email marketing. This Tuesday we had the amazing email marketing guru, Kurt Johansen, who shared some incredible facts about email and about how business owners should make use (not abuse!) of this practice.

If you want to learn how to use email marketing to engage with your audience, or if you are interested in finding out the DOs and the DON’Ts of email marketing, then read on... you’ve come to the right place.

Let’s see what are the key points that Kurt and I talked about during the webinar:

1. What is email marketing? You have to understand that, when it comes to this topic, there is no single definition for it. Email marketing has LOTS of benefits, and Kurt and I talked about it in a past podcast.

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Email marketing with Kurt Johansen:

3 Critical Points to Stay Legal &

5 strategy questions to get started

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In short, the main benefits of email marketing are: You can use it to drive more traffic to your website It is a great means of keeping in touch with your audience You can create immediate cash surges

Deriving from that, we can easily see that email marketing is not one big thing, but a multitude of elements incorporated in one brainy strategy. Email marketing means:

A way of sending out special sales campaigns to your customers and prospects A way of marketing to non-customers to bring additional sales and profits The use of an email newsletter to drive more traffic to your website

But, more than everything else, email marketing is all about the relationship that you have with your list. At first, your will have to grow your list; then, you will have to create a relationship with that list; only once you’ve done that you can present your audience your offer.

Email marketing is NOT about selling, it is about giving.

2. The Critical Points of the Spam Act A lot of us, I am sure, can remember the days when our inboxes were literally assaulted by thousands of spammy emails.

That was until 2003, when the Spam Act was published. Since then, a lot of things have cleared up and, although some spam emails still manage to get to our Inbox, we must admit they are very few as compared to what they used to be in the past…

Kurt insisted on presenting the legal borders of email marketing - and I saluted his decision. So the next point we talked about in the interview was called simply: What Are You Allowed To Do (in Australia and overseas).

This is how I discovered that the Spam Act covers 4 big areas of B2C and B2B marketing, but it also gives marketers a green light on a lot of other marketing tools. The Spam Act covers:

email SMS MMS IM (Instant Messaging)

The Spam Act doesn’t cover:

mail letters flyers / brochures / pamphlets telemarketing calls popups non-commercial messages VOID OF LINKS

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These rules apply to both incoming and ongoing messages, and they are also available for emails that you send overseas.

3. Avoiding Penalties If you are practising email marketing in your business, then I am sure you wouldn’t want to get a $200,000 fee a day for malpractice. Right?

As long as you stay within the legal lines of email marketing you should have no problems marketing to your audience through this tool. In fact, the main reason why the Spam Act exists in the first place is to preserve legitimate business messages. Along with that, its objective is to encourage responsible use and to help people get rid of unsolicited messages. So if you think about it, the Spam Act works to your advantage: you will get into people’s Inbox as long as you have their agreement; you will be able to market to these people as long as you don’t cross the line; and you will grow your business if the messages you send out are legitimate.

In short, the 3 critical points to stay legal are: 1. Have people’s consent (expressed or inferred) 2. Identify yourself in each of your emails (include a signature at the end of your

messages) 3. Include an easy way for people to unsubscribe from your emails (clear, personal,

should be made within 5 working days)

Now, in the interview, Kurt talks a lot about the two types of consent and what they mean. The bottom line is, as long as you have people’s consent to use their email address, you shouldn’t worry about legal terms.

Nonetheless, I do advise you to watch the interview, because Kurt makes some great points about inferred consent, such as:

Can you use a person’s email address if they gave you their business card? Can you send an email to a previous client whose email you have? Can you send emails to conspicuously published email addresses?

4. The 7 REAL benefits of email marketing 1. Increases sales 2. Reduces Marketing Costs 3. Builds Customer Loyalty 4. Shortens Sales Cycle 5. Generates Referrals 6. Maximizes Branding Penetration

5. How can YOU perform email marketing? Kurt advises us to always search for time saving tools. I am a big fan of these tools too, so I was very happy that Kurt mentioned this in the interview. What he suggested was to use a fully automated email marketing system to build, segment and manage our database.

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Another important tip he shared was that we should use a fully personalised email address. “If you are going to enter into email marketing, don’t use Gmail addresses, or Yahoo, or Hotmail”, Kurt says.

This is not because these are bad, but they are definitely not good for email marketing because they don’t express professionalism. So what Kurt suggests is that you should have an address as follows:

[yourname]@[yourbusinessname].com /.com.au

“Don’t use admin@ or sales@ or those top generic email addresses”, Kurt says, “use your first name and your business name as an email address to send to and respond to for email marketing”. That’s it! These were this Tuesday’s golden nuggets, but I will definitely be looking forward to seeing you next week on our next Sydney Business Month webinar...

These being said, I now invite you to listen to the interview - it’s a 100% win for you and your business! And don’t forget to jot down the information you think is useful.

Now it’s your turn… Are you using email marketing in your business? Is it working? What strategies do you think you could implement to increase the success of your email marketing? I will be in the Comments section, reading, sharing and learning with you! :)

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