454 – The money is in email: Tom talks Email Marketing Part 1

Episode 454 – Email Marketing Part 1
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everyone it's Tom here with episode four hundred fifty four of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm going to do revisit something here that I did a couple of years ago. I mean, it's very lucrative, but there's been some major changes in email marketing. So this is going to be part one and then next Monday will be part two. So I got to tell you, email marketing is where the money is. You really got to absorb this episode and next Monday's episode and visit the show notes for examples, because with all the other stuff that's available, people at my level, we're all making the money off email. All right. There's very few exceptions. OK, so so check that out. Now, how would you like me to speak in the money? How do you like me to send you a lot of money? Well, if you refer me, my affiliate program pays big commissions and I hardly get any refunds. So your people you refer me to will be very happy because I always do quality products and services and I really am a stickler on customer service. So email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com if you're interested in that program and grab a copy of our Automation eBook.

[00:01:38] We've told you about this a hundred times and if you haven't downloaded this yet, what is wrong with you? This will save you enormous amounts of work. It'll just make you lightning fast so you have more time to do the other stuff you want to do. So check it out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and do the darn stuff. I'm telling you, you're going to thank me and pick up a copy of our podcast app while you're at it. screwthecommute.com/app so you can take us with you on the road. Now I usually tell you about my school, but there's something way bigger than that. And it's a program we're doing for people with disabilities and we're we're doing a go fund me campaign to finance their tuitions and we're going to hire people with disabilities to help run the program. And I'm just so excited about it. But I really need your help because it's a lot more work to to help these folks. And, you know, they have to some of them are sight impaired. Some of them have mobility problems and, you know, all kinds of things. So. We need your help, we're going to like said, we're going to hire people with disabilities to help run the program, we're going to spend a lot more of our instructor time and things helping people.

[00:03:00] So we need your help. And then let me tell you, the big vision. The big vision is to make this successful, get them hired or starting their own business or both. And then I'm taking a grant writing course so I learn how to approach corporations and foundations so we can really ramp this up big and help lots and lots of people. So please give us a hand on this. Go to the the school site, IMTCVA.org/disabilities, and that'll be in the show notes.

[00:03:34] All right. Let's get to the main event. Email marketing. Now, you can make a lot of money with quality email marketing, and that's the way I've done it for 27 years now. But still to this day, with all the fancy social media and text and messenger marketing, people at my level make virtually all our money through email. Now, in this Part one episode, I'm going to cover the mechanics and some of the theories of email marketing. And next Monday, I'm going to cover the extremely important issue of subject lines. So if they don't open the email, nothing else matters. Then in a future episode, I'll cover this building. Now, the reason I'm doing it in this order is to save you from yourself, OK? I don't want you emailing a bunch of people and getting no results, and I especially don't want you to get negative results. You got to do this right to get the results you want.

[00:04:33] And I just said negative results. What do I mean by that? Negative results at the mild end. I mean, your emails. Well, they take you too long to create. At the moderate negative level, many of your emails get caught in spam filters, so you kind of wasted your time and nobody's going to see it. And at the severe negative level, oh, my God, I lived through this one time and that was enough for my whole career. You get yours and possibly someone else's website shut down because of something you did, either on purpose or just because you didn't know any better, or you relied on what somebody else said that wasn't in your best interest. And I've even run something that is in a podcast mastermind. And somebody was bragging about this new email program that grabbed people's addresses and they didn't know it. And they kept arguing with me about how, yeah, it's legit. It's legit. No, it's not legit. I have to give you permission to email them. Oh, boy. Well, we'll get into that later. All right. So in this episode, I'll be covering all the things you need to know about email marketing to be efficient and safe. And then next Monday, I'll show you how to get the darn things opened and how to sell more stuff. All right, now, email marketing also includes autoresponder marketing, which autoresponder are emailed.

[00:06:08] But they're they're triggered in a certain way, and I probably should recap that here, a broadcast e-mail is one that you send out to a bunch of people any time you feel like. And autoresponder email is triggered by something the other people do. So you decide on when you want to send a broadcast. Other people trigger autoresponder responders that you have made up. And they say they might buy something or opt in to your list or they they sign up for something to get a freebie, you're giving them in some cases they could email you a certain email address to trigger the autoresponder, but you just don't see that very often anymore. I covered Autoresponder heavily in Episode 10, all about shopping cart systems where good shopping cart systems include unlimited numbers of autoresponder and you really should review that episode and note that we use and promote KickstartCart.com. And of course, that'll be in the show notes for you. OK, I got some overriding principles for you in general, the more email you send, the more money you'll make. Up to a point. OK, you can overdo it, but most people don't. I'm going to talk to you more about in the frequency section next week. But and that section is going to be about how to figure out how often you should send email for your market and your promotion's. The next principle is in my not so humble opinion.

[00:07:51] All right. Social media has one purpose and one purpose only, and that's to get the people the heck off of social media and onto an email list that's under your control. Yeah, I know social media is a must for credibility building, and the people that want to do business with you are going to frequently check out your social media or I get all that. But from a money standpoint, you will make the money from email and you won't be susceptible to the constant social media changes that can wipe out everything you've done in a second. All right, now, the third principle is the trend is to shorter emails leading to a Web page. See, the longer your email is, the more chance it will innocently get caught in a spam filter. And there are techniques I'm going to tell you about. And next week, a really powerful one that's about short emails that gets way more people to open your stuff and way more people to click through to your website where you can sell them a lot of stuff. But that so that part's next week. But right now, we're going to talk about spam. That's really important subject. So if you're a legitimate business person or aspire to be one, you do not want to be thought of as a spammer. And you're going to see people trying to sell you tens of thousands of emails for five or ten dollars or some ridiculous thing like that, if you would send an email to that list.

[00:09:32] Most likely many of the emails are bad and the ones that get through, I got to tell you that you should hope they don't respond. Right. You know, they're probably not going to, but you should hope they don't because. They're going to cash you out. They're going to threaten to kill you and complain to your email and Web host and possibly get you shut down completely. I've even seen it so bad. They will go to any lengths in your spam email and have those sites shut down and you'll and you'll likely get sued by those website owners. Right. So you just can't get sucked in by the thought of quick email riches. It does not happen. Now, on the other hand, if you do it correctly, like I'm going to teach you in these two episodes, it can create enormous regular income for you and your family. Now, which do you want? Great regular income for years is a dumb question or immediately lose everything online for spamming. Shouldn't shouldn't be that hard of a decision. All right, let's talk about U.S. unsolicited commercial e-mail, that's the legal term for an electronic promotional message sent to a consumer without the consumer's prior request or consent. We just call it spam. Now, here are some typical ways you can become a spammer. All right, if you are so inspired and I don't want you to become a spammer, but doing these things will ensure you become a spammer, at least accidentally.

[00:11:17] All right, here's here's a list of sending an email that someone didn't ask for and then telling them they can opt out if they don't want them anymore. Opt out makes you a spammer. They didn't ask for the first e-mail in the first place, so you're a spammer, opting out is spam, period. Scraping is an expert using a piece of software to grab email addresses off of thousands of websites and then emailing those addresses, you're a spammer. All right. Here's a very common when I see all the time someone gets a directory, let's say accountants, and they type in all the emails by hand and email all the accounts. Oh, you're a spammer. Suppose that. Now, buying a list, as I mentioned before, that haven't specifically agreed to get emails from that list and a lot of the people that sell these things are just lying scumbags, you know, so they just want to get your money. So it's very, very risky to do that. OK, emailing from business cards. Now, what I do is I ask the person giving me a business card if it's OK to email them, and I note on the card when and where I ask them. Now, I do this a lot when I speak, I hold a business card drawing and I tell people from the stage, usually on video recorded, that if they don't want to get emails from me, just write no emails on the business card.

[00:13:05] Then hardly anybody does because I don't do that until at least halfway where they see fantastic value from my speech. And I teach all this stuff in my entire back of the room sales method is part of my professional speaking mentor program at screwthecommute.com/prospeaking. And I've made millions of dollars selling at the back of the room without being obnoxious, so I can teach you how to do it. But anyway, that's how speaking and and emails work together. You got to get their permission, get it on video, get it on tape, and then give them the chance to opt out right there before you ever send them an email by writing it on their business card. OK, now we're still on the subject of spam now, in 2003, the Can Spam Act was passed into law and this makes it very clear for business people how to stay out of trouble when sending commercial emails. And the link to this on the Federal Trade Commission site is humongous in the guidelines are all there. So I'll put it in the show notes. But I highly recommend you. You read through it. All right, so that discussion was all about who you can send to and what you must do.

[00:14:25] So you aren't considered a spammer, but here's the thing, just because you aren't a spammer does not mean your emails will get through spam filters. Even to people that want your emails, so this next section is going to tell you what to do to get the most possible emails to the intended recipients. And so let's talk about spam triggers, spam triggers are words or phrases that make your email look like spam to a spam filter. Now, you could innocently write something that to you and even to the recipient, looks like nothing but the information you wanted to convey about your product or service or free webinar or whatever you write in about. But to a spam filter that sees a billion emails an hour. That innocent thing you wrote may look like spam to the spam filter and your email doesn't get through, so you must avoid putting these words and phrases in your emails. For instance, I never used the word money or free in an email, and there are hundreds more things I don't do, probably thousands of words and phrases you don't want to use. Now, I really want you to get a feel for them. So in the show notes, I've put links to lots of lists of spam traders. However, there is an easier way to avoid the spam filters, which I highly suggest you use because it's more accurate and up to date than you could ever be.

[00:16:09] And it's way faster. So antispam assassin. Oh, now I have no affiliation with this company directly or get any money from them. This is a program which is always kept up to date where you can put in your e-mail that you plan on sending out and it will evaluate what your email looks like to a spam filter before you send it. That way, you can fix any problems and get a better spam score. Now, in spam scores, the lower the score, the better. Five is bad. Zero is great. Now, Spam assassin gives you a five as your score. Don't even bother sending out the email. And here's a couple of reasons why virtually none of the emails will get through. You're basically wasting your time and this is an extra bad one you probably didn't think of. Now the server you are sending from starts to look like a spam server where eventually everyone refuses to accept emails from your server because that server is sending out spam all the time. So so that's three things that are really bad about this. Don't send out emails that look like spam. Now, you can either sign up separately for spam assassin or it's included very conveniently in the email section of the shopping cart system, I promote KickstartCart. So in the email section of the card, all you have to do is paste in your email.

[00:17:49] Click the spam assassin link and read your score if it's a good score, you hit send. If it's not spam, assassin tells you what to fix, you fix it and then hit send. Now, in that extra 30 seconds, you can make a lot more money because more of your e-mails will get through. Now, you also want to put a section on your Web site on how people can whitelist your e-mail, in other words, they're telling their spam and junk mail filters definitively that they want to receive your e-mail and not let a spam filter be the judge. Now, it's not 100 percent perfect because there's spam filters all along the way before they get to the recipient, but it will help get more emails through. So you can see my whitelist there at screwthecommute.com/whitelist and basically copy it. Double check that everything's still current and put it on your website. All right. Now, when you get into email marketing, you will most likely get approached about ad swaps and solo ads and these with other list owners. You got to be extremely careful about these deals. If the other list owner hasn't been careful about how they got their email addresses, you could get in trouble or shut down by having your email or your link on their email. So be especially aware when you see people claiming really large list and only charging you a little to advertise yourself to their list.

[00:19:27] I can't tell you how many times those lists were all scraped email addresses, fake email addresses. And if you're lucky, you will only lose money for being advertised in the list. If you're not so lucky again, you could get shut down. And one other thing about spam, you should clean up your undeliverable emails. These are called bouncer's. There's hard bounces and soft bounces, hard bounces, clean them out. They can't possibly get through the addresses bad or the is no address there anymore. Whatever soft bounces, you can let it try a couple of times. Maybe there was just a glitch. But once a thing bounces three, four or five times, it ain't going through and you're just looking worse. You're open rates will be less and you're looking worse to the servers and the spam filters and everything. All right. So you don't want to look like a spammer just because you got a bunch of undeliverable emails. So keep your list clean. And and most of the services, star card included will give you a list of bounces. They'll say hard bounce off, bounce or unknown. And you just look at it, you know, once a week, you just take a peek at, oh, OK. It looks all right. Close it. The next week, though, you saw. Oh, my God, there was forty eight hard bounces.

[00:20:51] Well, go and delete those people. You know, don't keep sending to a hard bounce. I mean, that's going to make you look really bad. Now, this is spam related, and I'm going to cover it in the future episode on this building, but you do have to decide if you want people to double opt in to your list or single opt in is good enough and won't cover that in this building in a different episode. But the only thing I wanted you to know is that single opt in has more of a chance to get spam complaints. See, because single opt in means anybody could go to your sign up form and throw somebody else's address in there just to harass them. And then you start emailing them all crazy and then they blame you. And the person that did this whole thing is sitting back and looking and laughing at both of you say, so double opt in is more safe for you to get out of spam complaints, but you'll get less people to sign up because some won't notice the confirmation email that they get. That said, that says, do you really want to be on this list? But that's a decision you can make. Or if you're in my program, I'll help you make the decision based on your situation and your market. OK, let's look at the format of your email now, people in my boot camps and by the way, those of you that don't know bootcamp is one of that is probably the longest now running, continuously running Internet marketing seminar ever.

[00:22:17] It mine started the late 96 or 97, early 97. And I come from a comic background and people were begging me to teach them what I had learned about Internet marketing, but I was not about to do what everybody else does so and have a boot camp. And I thought, oh, man, I'm sitting here making all this money, sitting on my rear end. I'll call it boot camp and it caught on. I know it's a goofy name, but it's a very serious seminar on Internet marketing. I've done them in 11 countries around the world except in England. They made me call it bum camp. So anyway, people at the camps always want to argue with me about whether they should do their emails in plain text or HTML and HTML means will come out all nicely formatted and looking like a Web page. And here's what I used to say, that we're getting into those big changes here now, folks. Here's what I used to say for probably 25 years that I've been doing this out of 27. I would say. Get this through your head, nobody at my level who makes their living Internet marketing and sending emails uses HTML email, we just use plain text and I'll tell you why in a minute.

[00:23:38] So that's what I would say, twenty five years dead against it. And and also, I thought you might see some well-known person use it because some geek is doing it for them and that geek never made a nickel actually selling online. The well-known celebrity didn't know any better. They make their money some other way and they don't depend on email to do it. So you can't count on that just because you see some big shots and. But everybody says, oh, I want it to look so pretty and impressive. Well, all that prettiness doesn't mean a thing if you don't make money from the email or if they never even see it. There's so many negative states, HTML, e-mail, this is all the stuff I preached for years, see, HTML takes way more time to create. I could create four or more email promotion's easily and just plain text and make way more money in the same amount of time as you creating your one super fancy nice HTML e-mail. Now, HTML e-mail can make you look bad and you'll never even know it, some estimates say that as much as 60 percent of HTML e-mail does not get to the recipient looking like it was intended a look when you sent it. Now, this means if you aren't a really professional level email tech person, you probably don't know all the tricks necessary to make your HTML email look good when it gets to your subscriber.

[00:25:15] And if you hire one of these people, you're going to pay a fortune because that's a pretty high level person. Remember, this is all the stuff I've been railing against for years, I'm going to tell you a big change here shortly. Now, HDMI was originally invented by the porn industry, many people still to this day, the spam filters tend to target HTML e-mail, which could further limit their delivery of your e-mails. And many reciprocal recipients of your email, me included, have preview windows that are set to eliminate graphics. So your gorgeous e-mail looks terrible in the preview window and may not convey any of your message. So people won't be inclined to even open it. Now, as an experienced marketer in the past, the only time I would even consider HTML email is if I was starting a new project and I wanted to know the open rates of the emails. This can be calculated with a HTML email, but not with plain text. Then I would switch back to plain text. All right, a couple years ago, the Internet world changed, and so, like I always do, I changed with it. I now use HTML e-mail after 25 years. The last two years, I've been using HTML email, but guess what? It's still not fancy. It's still only text and links. The graphics will still have all the problems I noted above, and it would still take you way longer to create and it's going to potentially look like hell and you wouldn't even know it because of all the different email receiving people.

[00:27:11] And it looks good to you when you send it, but you have no idea what it's going to look when they get it. And that's the bad part, because you're sitting here all happy and all proud of yourself and they're sitting there thinking what a what an idiot this things looks like. Well, I don't want to say a kindergartener because they could probably do better than you anyway, but it looks really bad on their end. Now, I use e-mail because it's more accepted. I can easily monitor open rates, I can use simple formatting that I couldn't do with plain text, I can bowl, I can change fonts, I can change the size of the fonts. Now, don't get crazy with fonts either, because if the recipient doesn't have that font, a fancy font on their computer, it's going to default to their default font. And you have, again, no idea what it looks like. So just use standard fonts. I think I said I can change the size of the fonts, I can add bullets, I can add color, I can embed long links under text, like click here. And it might be a humungous length that would look crazy, but under the click here, it doesn't look crazy. Hey. Some of those things we still do as we put space between paragraphs, keep the paragraphs very short, one or two sentences.

[00:28:33] Remember, you're never going to get away from your English teacher for sales and email copy. So don't worry about it. We care about the easy readability on a screen for the recipients so they can understand your email. And remember, you've got to make sure it looks good on cell phones and tablets to say that's that's been for quite a few years now. So we want it to be readable for the recipients so they can understand it easily and be encouraged to buy your stuff or click through to your website sales letters so you make money. Now, oh, and just a little bit about paragraph length, see if you write these long paragraphs or take it from your book and just paste it in, it fills up the whole screen on a cell phone and people, you know, can't hardly read it all now. And then they look at it and they say, oh, man, that's too hard to read. And they leave. So short paragraphs. All right. Now you can read about the Can Spam Act. And and you know, that link that I gave you earlier and you must have your contact info in an easy remove link and all your e-mails now if you're using Kickstartcart.com. All of this is inserted automatically for you. All right, now, before we end up part one, I want to give you a tip on your subject lines, which I'm going to cover in depth next week.

[00:29:57] But before that, I want to remind you about the program my school is doing with persons with disabilities and how I so want and need your support, so many people have commented on the Facebook page to cheer on the disabled candidates in the school and and to support the program on the crowdfunding page. So please lend your support at Imtech Vegas disabilities and then click on our Go Fund Me like. Thanks very much for that. OK, here's your tip on subject lines, make them 140 characters or less, including spaces, put the most important part of the subject line to the left. So I looked at the way I have my email set up, and I have it's been that way for years and I can only see 36 characters. So this is extremely important because like I said earlier, if the subject line doesn't make them want to open the email, nothing else you do after that matters. So there's your tip. Now, please visit the school site and support to Go Fund Me program for the people with disabilities and I'll catch you on the next episode. And then next Monday we'll have part two of this where will really show you how to make make money and get the emails opened and get clicks to your website. All right, catch ya later.

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