Newsletter Marketing is Permission Marketing is Relationship Marketing

When I first got into studying online marketing the name of the game was traffic, indiscriminate traffic.  The idea in my mind was that if I was capable of driving large numbers of people to my websites, then I would be able to make money.  I believe this attitude came from the impression that most people get of online marketing which likely comes from the dot com era companies that focused exclusively on building large audiences with little consideration of what their business model would be.  I think we know what happened there.

Eventually I discovered Google Adwords, and the idea of PPC marketing.  For as little as $0.15 per click, I could drive visitors who were interested in “badminton dvds” to my website where I was selling badminton dvds.  This sort of worked, and we succeeded in making a bit of money, but it was never anything to make the trip to the post office worthwhile (I’ll go into automation of this process another time perhaps).  What we were missing out on was in spite of the fact that we were making a few one off sales, we were doing nothing to establish a long term relationship with our customers.  We could have gone through our PayPal history to review contact information that way, but it wasn’t automated, and we weren’t doing anything to keep in contact with them on a regular basis.

Shortly after this we started up our blog.  It was a way to talk about badminton tournament results, and to post up the promotional trailers we made for the videos.  We had an audience, but they were faceless, and the communication was completely one way besides the occasional comment here and there.  We tried a forum, but it was spammed to hell and never really got any traction.  This probably had more to do with our lack of experience with running a forum, but nonetheless it didn’t work for us.  We didn’t have a way of capturing our prospects information.  We didn’t even know what the concept of a prospect was.

After experimenting with blogging and online marketing for quite a while we stopped and focused on our offline business.  Looking back it’s unfortunate to see just how close we were, and how many great ideas we had that we just didn’t execute properly because we didn’t understand some of the important underlying concepts.  This lack of understanding applied to the marketing of our offline business as well.  We were offering video production services in a blue collar city that had little appreciation for what we provided, and our marketing strategy seemed to be one of hope for a phone call or email.  We had some good SEO for our region and as a result got some contact that way, but we were probably losing a lot of the prospects that visited our website because once they were there we did nothing with them.

After leaving my old business I started to get back into blogging again.  At this point I really started to learn the importance of building an RSS readership.  Well known bloggers John Chow and Shoemoney were in the midst of an RSS contest, where the winner was the one who could add the most RSS readers during the course of the contest.  Shoemoney even had a post where you could determine the value of each new RSS reader to budget how much you would spend to get new readers.  I know that Shoemoney has since changed his blogging strategy to be more email focused now after spending time with John Reese I believe.  Whether it is RSS readers or Email subscribers the concept is the same, lead acquisition.  Each person who subscribes to your RSS feed or Email newsletter, are potential customers.  Perhaps they will by something that you are selling down the road, perhaps not, but if you don’t have some method of capturing them as a prospect or lead, you’re wasting your traffic.  You need to design your website in such a way that you are actively trying to get subscribers of some kind.  I’m not going to go into detail on how to do this other than to say look at how other websites are doing this already.  How many newsletters are you subscribed to without realizing it?  You might think it’s spam, but you probably signed up your email address at some point in time.  They were likely very effective in capturing their prospects email addresses.

What I was hearing from so many online marketers was that I was wasting my time and my traffic if I wasn’t building an email list.  These are prospects you can try and market to down the road.  The email list is your business.  The more targeted this list is, the more profitable it can potentially be.  My newsletter is targeted towards people who want badminton coaching advice, subscribe and I’ll help you to become better at badminton.  As I’m writing this post we have over 250 prospects signed up to our newsletter, 100 or so were added in the last month mostly through advertising on Facebook for people who were interested in badminton.  The idea is that I ask someone for their permission to market to them.  They want to know more about how to improve their badminton game, and I’ll help them with that if they provide me their email address.  I then proceed to give them some free tips, and eventually tell them about the products that I sell that will help them even more.  It’s a win-win situation for both sides.  You email list is your business.

It doesn’t end there though.  You can’t just try and sell people something, you need to build a relationship with them.  By building rapport, and credibility with your audience you are increasing the value of your list even further.  The more honest you are with your subscribers, the more weight your recommendations carry.  This idea applies to all businesses, not just my badminton business.  Were I still in the video production business I would likely start a newsletter educating people on how to use video to help them market their business.  That was in fact the greatest challenge for us, to convince prospects of the value, and to provide them with some ideas as to how they could actually use video to market their business.  If someone remains subscribed to your newsletter you have an ongoing opportunity which you can build up trust between you and the subscriber, then when you do present them with an offer of some sort they are much more likely to be receptive.

Much of this I learned from observing a number of “make money online” bloggers including Shoemoney, Yaro Starak, John Chow, Darren Rowse, and many others, but I read a book (listened to the audiobook actually) called Permission Marketing by Seth Godin.  Permission Marketing gives some great insights into this practice, as well as some great examples of companies that are using “permission marketing” tactics.  I can whole heartedly recommend this book.

As for service providers, I currently use Aweber.  Aweber seems to be the market leader (at least from where I’m sitting), and it works great for my purposes thus far.  I have no experience with the other providers of email marketing software, however I have been playing with OneShoppingCart for my membership website’s shopping cart.  I may have to switch to Clickbank however as there are some limitations it would appear for using OneShoppingCart with PayPal and their recurring billing option.  Something to do with the way that PayPal captures CV2 numbers from the back of users’ credit cards.  I can certainly recommened Aweber as I have had good experiences with it so far.

Looking back on all of the tactics I have learned over the last 4-5 years I am reminded of a famous Bruce Lee quote that goes a little something like this:

Before I learned martial arts, a punch was just a punch and a kick was just a kick. When I studied martial arts, a punch was no longer just a punch and a kick was no longer just a kick. Now I understand martial arts, and a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.

5 years ago online marketing seemed simple, like there was really nothing to it.  You just did it.  Now after years of learning I’ve discovered that it really is quite complicated, you need to have a clear strategy, to build up a list of prospects, to test your methods, and so much more.  However, what I’m hoping is that after a little bit more time and a launch or two, that online marketing will seem pretty simple to me again, it sure seems that way to the big guys of the industry.