The Basics
of Evolved Email Marketing
Evolved Email Marketing is both a strategy and a framework on which you can create your email marketing program. At the heart of it all are four pillars.
Customer Centric Design
Your business exists because of your customers. You should approach your email marketing should be focused on supporting them using a serve-to-sell strategy versus a sell-then-serve strategy.
Right Message, Right Time
When you refocus your email marketing intent on serve-to-sell, timing becomes a necessity. You don’t speak to a new customer the same way to do to a returning one. Your email marketing needs to reflect this understanding.
Consistent Contact
In modern marketing, consistency wins the sale more effectively than any other tactic. Showing up with supportive, brand aligned, correctly timed messaging on a regular basis will create life-long, loyal customers.
Process Supportive
Email marketing needs to be an integrated part of your business process, dovetailing with and supporting the customers entire lifecycle.
Step One: Adjust Your Mindset
If you hold the belief that email marketing is intrusive, ineffective, or that you, personally, are unable to execute the steps needed to implement an email marketing strategy for your business, failure as an email marketer is almost inevitable. Review the statistics, educate yourself, get smart about technology, and make smart decisions based on what your customers need versus your fears and unfounded worries. Most importantly: Adopt a marketing-as-service way of being in your business.
Step Two: Make it Your Mission to Understand Your Customers
Customer research doesn’t end on the last page of your marketing/business plan. It actually is just beginning at the beginning of your business. Knowing how customers move into, through, return, and move out of your business is the key to unlocking an evolved email marketing strategy and realizing the growth potential of your small business.
Step Three: Hone Your Business Processes
Once you know your customers, you can better create systems that serve both them and you. The goal is to know “how we do it here” so well that you can choreograph all the moves you need to make to guide your customer into your business, through the sales process, service them accordingly, encourage them to help you find more people like them, and invite them to return again and again.
Step Four: Employ Automation & Technology
I’ve mentioned that Evolved Email Marketing is for small business and I mean it. Small businesses don’t typcially have a marketing department. They have the owner or one person who does marketing and (insert other role here). No one has the time to do all the things by hand for all the customers all the time. This is why we have technology and automation. If you haven’t done steps one-three, however, this step becomes incredibly difficult or impossible. If you’ve tried automation and failed, it’s likely you need to go back two steps.
Step Five: Let the Reports Guide You to Greater Success
Email marketing is one of the easiest marketing avenues for tracking engagement and ROI. Learn how to use your reports to make smart decisions on when to keep going with a strategy that’s working well or pivot on strategies that are failing.
Will this work for me?
Evolved Email Marketing isn’t for every business. Here’s how to know if it’s for you:
You’re a owner-operated small business or soloprenuer who needs help converting and serving your customers.
You are an artist, creative, influencer, or creator who is seeking better engagement with your audience.
You are an author, speaker, or private educator who would like more sales and better relationships with your followers.
You are a small business that doesn’t have a full-time marketing person or hasn’t hired a marketing agency.
You are a small product-based business that wants to maintain engagement with purchasers long-term for service or sales purposes.
You are a mission or service based business or non-profit with a message you need to communicate more effectively resulting in revenue and referrals.
You are a professional services business who would like to create happier customers who spend more, are loyal, and recommend you to their friends.