There are several email broadcast service providers that you can use to send out groups of emails to clients and prospects that have subscribed to your email list. For my most up to date list, download my special report called Special Report: Autoresponder and Email Broadcast Services.
WARNING: Never, ever use your regular email account to send out emails to people on your list. That means do NOT use the BCC, CC and especially do not mail your list by having them all in the TO field. You should use an email broadcast service instead to ensure you are complying with the laws for sending emails.
There are some free and low cost email broadcast service providers that you can use for small lists of less than 500 people. Most small businesses owners that are focusing on local business will find that having getting 500 people to voluntarily opt-in to your mailing list will take some time. Once you get larger than that, most email broadcast providers allow you to pay a little more for a larger list.
A major goal of your website is to get people to sign up for your email broadcast list. It is not unusual and I recommend giving people a good reason to join it. Some would say “bribe them” to join it. Give away something of value like a special report, a free audio download, a free video download, a coupon or special discount, a promise (that you plan to honor) of coupons or discounts over time or something else that would help you get the largest number of qualified prospects and clients to voluntarily sign up for your email list.
For those business owners that are doing very large scale lead generation, there are additional considerations that are beyond the scope of this material. Contact me directly for the most up-to-date information for doing very large scale lead generation and email marketing.
Backup Your List of Subscribers Often
Make sure you include backing up your list of email subscribers as part of your regular backup plans. Working hard for months or years to build up a list of prospects and clients that have opted to receive email communication from you could be lost in an instant if you fail to make consistent backups and something unexpected happens with your email broadcast provider.
Manually Adding Names to Your Email List That Did Not Opt-In
Don’t do it. Do not manually add people to your email list that not specifically opt-in and request information from you.
Specifically, if you are out actively networking and someone gives you their business card that is not permission to add them to your email broadcast list. If they tell you, “add me to your email list, I’d like to receive those emails you were telling me about,” that is a different story. However, you should not automatically assume that everyone you meet wants to receive broadcast emails from you.
To be clear, can you personally send them an email? Yes. Can you put them on your physical mailing list (think your printed newsletter sent via the US Postal Service)? Yes. Can you personally call them by telephone? Yes. Can you add them to your email broadcast list to send them your email newsletter? No, I don’t think you should.
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Let’s talk about email broadcasts. We talked about quite a bit about email and setting up your email system earlier today. Email broadcast is when you have your list of people that have subscribed to your email lists, and remember it they have to have signed themselves up. You should not be adding people on your own, and you should definitely not be buying lists of people may be interested. But if they’ve signed themselves up to receive emails from you, one of the things that you can do is go ahead and send out email broadcasts using your email broadcast system in order to generate direct sales, referrals, send out e-zines, anything like that can be done be via email broadcasts.
So is email broadcast usually one-step or two-step? Well actually it’s usually two-step. A lot of times you would think you could just put your whole marketing message in the email. But what tends to happen is, you tend to get caught in spam filters and a lot of that when you start putting a ton of content in email. And so what a lot of people are doing is they’re actually putting a little bit of information in the email, enough to get the people the click in the email to a web page that’s got the full marketing message on the webpage. Or they’ve got a telephone number in there where people can call and get the rest of the marketing message. So most email broadcast is probably going to be two-step marketing. It can be one step in some cases, but most of the time I think you’re going to find it to be two-step.
How to get it done? Definitely go sign up for a professional email broadcast service. And as I mentioned before, if you go to LearnToBeRich.com and you look for the downloads link on the right hand side, or if you got to LearnToBeRich.com/downloads (that’s plural, all lower case), then I’ll have a special report on there about the email broadcast providers that I’m recommending right now and you can use a link in there to get signed up. Once you get signed up, it’s really easy to do, you just log in, you upload whatever you’re going to mail out to them, and you pick your list of who you’re going to send it to if you’ve got more than one list, which we do. Then you go can ahead and send them out, and it’s usually out within like 15 minutes. So it’s very quick, very low cost to get it done. Well there’s two different models. There’s a free model with a lot of email providers, and there’s ones where you pay like $10, $15, $20 per month, something like that. And it may seem relatively high when you’ve only got 5, 10, 15, 20 subscribers. But usually those accounts allow you to have 5,000, 10,000 subscribers at that price. And so you’ll be able to do a decent of emails, a decent amount of people on your list, for the amount you’re paying, and then the price goes way down. So the price gets better as you get up to certain thresholds.
Whether it’s scalable or not — it is scalable, for the overwhelming majority of businesses that are not really pushing the limits as to trying to do tons of email. When you get to doing 300+ new prospects per day, you start running into some issues with scalability. But as far as a normal handyman business doing some marketing, you’re talking about something that’s extremely scalable. You can add 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 people a day and it’s not going to be an issue. For us, we are consistently pounding hundreds of people a day onto our email list. There are some scalability issues that you need to overcome.
The effectiveness – the effectiveness is odd, because I want to tell you that it’s very effective, because it’s cost effective. It doesn’t cost much to get it done. But I’ll tell you that people are reducing the value of email. Email is becoming cheap, and people look at that as cheap message and tend not to respond to it nearly as much. You’re going to get much better response from your physical newsletter, the one you mail in the mail, U.S. Snail mail, postal mail whatever you want to call it – not email, as compared to emails. But emails are easy to do so, you could send that one a week, and even though your response is going to be a fraction of what it is. Some direct marketing guys, I remember Gary Halbert talking recently, and he said that Snail mail is 20 times more effective than email. And I have some data to back that up, although I don’t have A-to-B data comparison to be able to say specifically. But I do have data that shows that he’s probably right. And so yeah, doing email is effective but it’s not highly effective, I guess is how I would say it. You’re probably going to be better off doing your normal newsletter. However, email is so cheap and it’s easy to do, and people are used to doing it, and that may be their preferred method of contacting you. And so definitely do it, and it’s cheap to do. So it is effective, I think there are other things that are more effective like newsletters, and direct mail broadcasts, direct-mail, newsletter type stuff.
Concerns and other things to be aware of: definitely be aware of the canned spam law, do not add people to your list. Make sure that you use a professional service. Include your normal regular mailing address when you do your mailing, to make sure you include a way for them to opt out. Make sure that you acknowledge by opting people out if they request it. You don’t have to reply back to them, but if they say, “Hey please remove me from your list” or something nastier than that, which some people would do by the way, then definitely remove them from your list. You do not want to have someone on you list who doesn’t want to receive stuff. It just doesn’t make sense. So remove them from your list, you won’t email anymore and you won’t get any complains from them anymore. So those are things to be aware of with email broadcasts.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn more about how to use email broadcasts to boost profitability for your handyman business? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
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Alright let’s see. Let’s talk about email broadcast software (you can find the list of providers I recommend on the downloads page). There are lots of, well not lots, there’s probably half a dozen good email broadcast software companies out there. I have used all of them. All the top ones I have actually used before. I think without exception, I can’t think of any exceptions. So there are several to choose from. The cost for them – there are plans for certain business models that allow you to do what’s called a free plan, they call it their “forever free plan,” I think is what they call it. And you can have up to 500 subscribers on it, which for most handyman businesses, you’re probably going to be under. But you can use that service, and it doesn’t cost you anything. You can only send out certain numbers of emails a month, but it’s reasonable. I think it’s like five emails per name, or something like that, up to 500 names on your list, or somewhere in that ball park. I’m well about the free threshold, so I’m not sure of the exact details. But if you go ahead and use that one, your email broadcast service will be free.
There are also other email broadcast services that are paid services, which I do recommend those as well. Most of them around about $20 per month in the starting plan, and that’s probably going to be big enough for the overwhelming majority of the handyman business owners, who are trying to set up their email broadcast service. And a lot of them offer unlimited sending of email, not that you want to be sending out that many, but it is not limited to that five-per-month thing. So if you needed to send out six in a month or whatever, you probably could do that. One thing I do want to point out is, please remember, do not use your regular email address provider in order to send out any time of broadcast emails. Don’t use your Gmail account, don’t use your Yahoo account, don’t use your AOL account, don’t use your Hotmail account. All of those email providers are intended to be sending single emails and the occasional email to you and group of friends, who’s getting together for dinner, whatever it is. It is not intended for you to send out to lists of people. Especially not repeatedly, especially not commercial marketing messages. So do not use your regular email just for so many reasons. CAN-SPAM laws, which you need to be in compliance with, as well as the email provider’s probably going to shut you down at some point if they get any complaints. Which is, if you’re doing any type of prospecting, if people don’t really know you super-well yet on your list, you’re going to get some complaints, it’s just part of doing business.
I think you should try to use your domain name versus the domain name of the email provider. One of the major email broadcast software companies tries to use their email address so they can kind of maintain quality control, and things of that nature. I understand completely why they’re doing it, it makes a lot of sense why they’re doing it. However, it is branding their email, not you, when they send out emails. So, I usually will try not use that particular company if I can avoid it. I’ll attempt to use another company that allows me to use my own email address with my own domain name in it. So when I’m sending out email from my email broadcast software, it says it’s coming from james@LearnToBeRich.com. In your case, it might be john@denverhandymanservices.com or whatever it is. And then you can go ahead and use your domain name in your email and not “handymanserviceone@soandsomailinglistcompany.com.” I prefer not to do it that way, so you want to do that.
As I mentioned before about backing your website, and how I back mine up every single day, you’re also going to want to backup your list of email addresses extremely often. I would back up mine, I wasn’t as fanatical because it wasn’t automated, but I would back up mine at least ones a week when I was doing my list. I mean, I was growing my list at a rate of probably 300 to 400 people per day. So I was growing my list extremely rapidly, for a lot of a lead generation stuff I was doing. By the way, handyman businesses on a local basis, are not going to be growing their lists at that rate. If you figure, you know, maybe one or two or three increase a day. I think that’s a good pace to be going for most handyman businesses trying to get people on their email list. You’re not going to be growing your list at 300 or 400 people a day. But that’s what I was growing my list at, and I would backup my list about once a week. You, because you’re getting so fewer of them, you may want to still do it, you know, once a week or every a few days in order to get them. And the way you back them up is you pull them your entire list off of your email broadcast software service. So you definitely want to get a provider that allows you to download them.
The challenge you’re going to run into is, a lot of email broadcast companies will not let you upload a pre-existing list to a new service. So, even if you’re able to download your list from one provider, a lot of companies are not going to let you upload that list and start mailing to them from another service. Partially because there are a lot people out there, and I know it’s not any of you guys, but there are a lot of people out there that will go and buy a list of names of email addresses, and do a broadcast out too, thinking that that’s a cheap way for them to generate business. They’ll go buy – and they used to sell these ridiculous things on EBay and all over the internet – five gazillion email addresses for $29.95 or $49.95. And what you get is a CD with, literally, just millions of email addresses on there. And then some people would go and try to upload sections in that email list, that they did not know at all, and had no idea who they were and no existing relationship with them, to one of these email providers, and just spam out, send out unsolicited commercial email to that list. Not recommended. So you want to go build your list, have people requesting specific information from you, having them sign up for your broadcast service, downloading your list regularly. But realize you could run into some challenges, it can be done, but you’re going to run into some challenges probably, trying to take your existing list that you downloaded from someone else, if you ever change companies and moving to a new company. So just wanted to mention that upfront, that you do want to back up your list, because you want to have it. But you’ll have some trouble, in most cases, trying to upload to another company. There are some companies that will allow you to do it. If you need to know that, contact me, I’ll let you know.
Alright, so getting people to request information and join your list should be a major goal of your website. That should be a major call to action from people, to say “sign up for my mailing list so I’ll give you these free tools, or free special reports, or I’ll give you a coupon of off your next handyman service.” Whatever it is you’re trying to do to get people to join your email list, should be a major focus of your website. And people should be signing themselves up to your list, not you signing them up for it. So I want to point that out too.
So we talked a little bit about manually adding names before, I’ll mention it again – do not add names to your email list manually. You can send them out a physical newsletter or snail mail, but do not go ahead and just add people you know and contacts you come and contact with to your email list automatically. I think it’s a poor practice. I think you should have them, if they’re interested enough to have them go to your website and sign up themselves. And you can have that as a point of your offers and your physical newsletters, the one you mail out, “Go to my website and sign up for this I’ll give you this special widget, or report, or whatever.” Anything you want to give away of value, to get people to go and add their name to that, I think would be a good idea.
Okay. Let’s talk about my latest recommendations for email broadcasting. If you want to know what I’m recommending at the time, you can go to the downloads page in order to find the downloads for a special report on email broadcast services.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Take your handyman business to the next level and use email marketing appropriately to get more handyman clients. Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
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In some other recent posts I’ve been discussing selling your house in a weekend. This continues that discussion by talking about using your buyers list.
Step number nine is to contact your existing buyers list. We talked about this a little bit when we went over voice broadcasts, about being able to voice broadcast to all the people that have ever called in before on your properties. But let’s say you have a list of names, addressses and telephone numbers. You could do several different things; you could do a direct mail piece, where you actually send out postcards or a letter or something to people on your list to let them know that you have this property for sale. If you’re collecting email addresses, you could do an email blast to them to let them know you have this property for sale. If your list is small, you can go and look through and see the people that are in this price range that wanted houses before and call them specifically to let them know you have this house for sale, and you could do a personal call that way. I do not usually do ALL that stuff.
I use lots of simple tools to leverage my time. I use voice broadcasts; I would do a postcard mailing, because it’s easy for me to take my list, export it to the US Postal Service website, put together a quick postcard and have it sent out without having to worry about it. I can get all that done within 30 minutes to an hour. So it’s very time effective, and I can just get it done and put it out there. Make sure you contact your existing list in order to let everyone else who has ever worked with you looking at buying a house that you’ve got another house for sale.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not yet seen the special free downloads page for real estate investors, check it out now.
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