Sacrilicious Marketing

Over the past few years, it seems many marketers, especially new media marketers, have gone soft on list building and list marketing. We’ve been so bombarded by permission and inbound marketing dogma that many of us see the idea of targeted non-permission based email marketing as old school and spamming. However, monetizing a list for immediate and long-term income is best accomplished by combining a specific offer with a conversion landing page, marketed through permission and non-permission based targeted bulk emailings.

Example:

Last month I used a combination of inbound, permission and non-permission based marketing with targeted lists, my results were as follows:

4 Steps To Having a Successful Mailing that Nobody Talks About

1. Define your offer on both a landing page and an HTML email

A solid email offer should be concise and specific. This means, forgo long, rambling text for short, call to action copy with vivid graphics. Also, make sure you explicitly explain your offer, give examples of your product or service and provide pricing. The page and email should offer the ability to immediately convert a reader to a lead or customer by directing them to your sales page. But the most important thing you must do is call people to action with either an amazing deal or a time limited offer. Ideally, you want to create the need to buy with an irresistible offer.

Good examples of offer-based conversion emails/pages:

Groupon

Jet Blue Deal of the Day

My Example: Sacrilicious Marketing Facebook Fan Page Offer

2. Target your audience and your message

While your product or service may have a broad user base from multiple segments of the consumer or B2B market, by targeting specific segments and creating specific messages for those segments, you will generate a higher conversion rate. For example, In my case, I offer Customized Facebook Fan Pages to the general business market but choose to target real estate professionals and restaurants/bars/clubs with vertical tailored landing pages and emails to get the best possible conversion rates from both my permission and non-permission lists.

Benefits of this strategy:

• This strategy makes sense especially for service-based offers because you can show specific examples of customers using your service within the same industry or interest, which creates a trust value in your ability to deliver and understand your customer’s unique need.
• Another benefit of this strategy is that if your product or service requires fulfillment, you can stage your roll out and overwhelm your production or distribution network while still meeting or exceeding your sales goals.
• By targeting a select vertical you can increase your referral network within that market and more fully saturate the market with your brand and service.

3. Build your list and buy a list

If you are not already building a list from your blog, Twitter or Facebook pages, you should be. This list has value as everybody that offers up their email to you would be most likely to convert to a customer because you have already built a trust value with them. Your list can be built through a special offer page, newsletter (although I don’t find these useful) or freemium offer for ebooks, webinars or free trials. This list constitutes your “opt in” or permission-based circle of influence. This list takes time to build and is generally small but will show a higher percentage of conversion than a non-permission based list.

On the other hand, buying a list of targeted emails can be extremely affordable and produce a reasonably high ROI with the right offer. Because most list rental services allow you to rent portions of their list monthly you can keep list costs low by figuring out exactly how many sales you will generate from any given list or portion of said list can help you determine the size of the list you should purchase each month to not overwhelm your fulfillment and distribution.

Here’s the math:

Assumptions: Provided you have a valuable offer and know your market, you should see at least a 1% return rate on any given list.

# of sales = size of list/100

4. Use the right services to send your emails, cull your list and track results

Using the right list rental and email services is extremely important. There are a lot of providers out there but only a few that understand the special needs of clients not using permission based lists, therefore you need to steer clear of providers like Constant Contact (good for newsletters) that frown upon non permission lists and opt for services like Simplicity Expedite (my personal favorite as they are very economical and provide list rental, email delivery from a third part domain and analytics). Additionally, because you are pushing traffic to your conversion landing page, you want to place a unique Google Analytics tracking code there to accurately measure your traffic from emails, referrals and other sources.

Conclusion:

OK, kids, there’s a lot more to email marketing than this but this is a start for new marketers or marketers rediscovering the value of non permission based email marketing. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to contact me and I would be happy to help you set up a system of your own.

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