Your book is titled Email Marketing for Complex Sales Cycles. What do you mean by that?
Winton Churchill: I divide email marketing into 2 categories. The first is a simple “retail” sale...this is the one we all get that essentially says, “Here is my product or service, please buy.”
The second is the complex sale. This is one that occurs over time and requires that you form a relationship with your prospect or educate them to a certain level about an issue before they buy.
Many years ago it made sense to send salespeople out into the field and have them knock on the doors of their complex sale prospects. The other alternative was to have an exotic and expensive “retail” location. Today that's too expensive.
But the biggest challenge that we face today with a complex sales cycle is getting the attention of our best prospects and then developing a relationship with them that builds the trust and respect required to close a complex sale.
Email marketing is often confused with spam. How is your definition of email marketing different from that received in the spam folder?
Winton Churchill: You’re right.
The big difference between email marketing and spam is that with ethical email marketing you have permission to send the email and it is relevant to your recipient’s interests.
The spam you get is unwelcome, from somebody you don’t trust and usually about something that you are not interested in.
Is there still a profit to be made using email as a marketing tool?
Winton Churchill: Yes, email is very profitable if used correctly. In fact, usually it is your lowest cost marketing tool once you have built your list.
Finding the right people to target is always a challenge for marketers. How can the ideal email marketing customers be found?
You have to go where your prospects are and entice them with content they would want. For some this means online, but for many businesses it means using offline messages as well. For example a direct mail campaign that offers your very highly targeted prospects an incentive for registering online at your website can be a very effective way to build a quality list quickly.
Today content is king. If you have an educational and/or an informative message that your prospects want to hear, see or read you have more options than ever before for getting that information in front of your audience.
Once there, if you effectively offer additional content (keyword is “effectively”) you are able to exchange your content for their email address.
Author Winton Churchill (photo left)
What are some of the common mistakes that email marketers make?
Winton Churchill: There are 3 that I see most often.
Mistake #1--Not targeting your message to your audience -- -- we are all happy to read advertisements and promotional messages related to our fields of interest...the less related, the lower our interest level. The most common mistake I see with companies today is sending messages to people because they can. They don't care if the message is relevant or welcome. This is the old-style push selling and always unwelcome.
Mistake #2--Thinking that writing an e-mail designed to elicit a response and eventually a sale, is like writing an e-mail about a company vacation policy. It's not. Writing copy is both a science and an art. There is a very significant amount of science and if you don't understand that you probably are going to waste all the money you spend on your list or irritate your prospects so severely that they ask you to stop sending them information.
Mistake #3 -- -- Not thinking about the specific small step you want your prospect to take when they finish reading your e-mail. If you sell a $10,000 product (or even a $20 product or service) it is very unlikely that your prospect will buy right away on the strength of a single in e-mail. But they could begin an investigation process that could lead them to that conclusion. Your job with each e-mail is to get them one notch closer to that decision to buy.
Too many e-mail solicitations today end with “...and visit our website for more information.” The research is very clear on this...this kind of call to action is extremely ineffective. You must be very specific about the next step you want your prospect to take. And that one step can’t make them feel like they’ve just been sucked into a sales process that unleashes a machine gun of emails on them.
Have you got a few tips to help an email marketing campaign manager to get started?
Winton Churchill: I do, but first I want to caution the business owner...
Email marketing is relatively easy to do but just one simple mistake can doom your campaign...
The same leverage that works in your favor, one marketing message to many people, means you can embarrass yourself and fry your relationship with your prospects if you make a mistake.
In fact, this is really why I wrote my book. Every week I am speaking live in front of an audience or on a radio show somewhere and I’m deluged with questions that go something like, “I tried email marketing and it didn’t work! Do you think it just won’t work in my situation?”
Usually the business owner made one or two of the simple mistakes I talk about in the book. Their campaign was fine except for a measly tactical error...wrong subject line, lack of personalization, bad list, etc.
Correcting the simple mistakes can often turn their campaign into a winner. Unfortunately most business owners make the unfounded leap to, “Email won’t work!”
So...first of all I would say read the book...most people can do it in 2 hours or less and then use some of the checklists and reminders in the book to clean up your campaign. I’ve talked with or had emails from so many readers who say they learned what their fatal mistake was in their last campaign by reading the book.
I feel so passionately about this that we offer a review of any email campaign a business owner is getting ready to launch (or has launched)...we look at 25 different factors and make at least 6 recommendations on how to improve the campaign. We charge $347 for that and if they don’t feel they get at least that much value out of it, we cheerfully refund their money. It is very cheap insurance...and the upside is so good.
If you can get an email campaign working successfully, it will usually work (with minor adaptations) for at least a year or 2 so it is very worthwhile to invest a little to get it right.
That being said, here are 3 things that I see as important “starters:”
Recommendation #1—Focus on building trust with your first email campaign. The basis for all sales activity is trust. The biggest mistake I see both new and “experienced” marketers make is trying to ram a sales pitch down the throat of a prospect before they have built trust.
Recommendation #2—Use a professional copy writer to prepare your first email campaign. Writing for persuasion is very different than business writing. You have to do many things right and only 1 or 2 things wrong will doom your campaign to failure. If you haven’t studied copywriting in depth you will probably make one of those campaign killing mistakes.
Recommendations #3—Test, Test, Test: Start small with your campaign and test variations of your copy, subject line and call to action. Let your prospect base tell you what they like, you’ll be rewarded for your attention. Be sure you keep an accurate count of your client preferences.
What is the future of email marketing?
Winton Churchill: The future of email marketing is very bright. As things like spam filters improve, authentication of senders gets better and laws and enforcement improve the overall menace of spam will be diminished.
When you have permission and communicate effectively email is extremely powerful and reliable. Getting that email address means you have a level of trust.
Learning to gain and keep that trust will give business owners a continuous flow of new opportunity and eliminate the anxiety and wasted motion associated with trying to “drive” sales.
What is next for Winton Churchill?
Winton Churchill: In the immediate future (through the middle of next month) I will continue on my book promotional tour. The tour has gone very well and just last week (first week of the tour) my book broke onto the Amazon.com Bestseller List in Web Marketing...so I am very gratified that this message is resonating with business owners. ..because most of them have not effectively used email.
Beyond that, we continue to serve our clients to help them develop cutting edge content that educates, informs and entertains...and help them find new and effective ways to deploy their content so it attracts new prospects...and maybe most importantly...help them steer clear of the expensive and unproductive marketing opportunities that rob so many businesses of their resources.
Thanks for your time and for your answers.
Winton Churchill: Thank you Wayne and I appreciate your blog for all the good work you do with it!
My book review of Email Marketing for Complex Sales Cycles: Proven Ways to Produce a Continuous Flow of Prospects and Profits with Effective Spam-Free Email System by Winton Churchill.
Winton Churchill (photo left)
For more information, visit Churchill Method. Visit Virtual Blog Tour for the most up to date information. His full tour schedule is posted at Winton Churchill Email Marketing Blog Tour. Winton Churchill is offering free gifts for every person that purchases his book Email Marketing for Complex Sales Cycles. Visit Winton Churchill - Book Bonus for full details about how to download these free gifts.
