The business case for regular emails
One of my first marketing mentors was and is Perry Marshall. I’ve subscribed to Perry’s emails since about 2006.
Within Perry’s community a long standing critique has been that his ongoing emails are too ‘salesy’. For a few years you only heard from him when he had a webinar to promote.
Well, a year ago Perry began sending a daily email called the ‘Perry Marshall Minute’. Every day he sends a brief insight into his work, often with a soft call to action or notification of an upcoming sales deadline. It’s still clearly a commercial message, but there’s clear and distinct value delivered first.
This is Perry’s assessment of the business impact of doing this:
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The first Perry Marshall Minute went out January 10th of 2022.
We missed one day. Not too bad.
Over the last 365 days we’ve tried to deliver a tactic, truth, or testimonial to inspire you and educate you.
Most of all we’ve tried to give you short, actionable ideas you can implement right away.
The results for us?
A 100% increase in the number of new members joining New Renaissance Club over last year.
Without any real changes to the club. Those are coming soon!
Stay tuned.
Plus, we’ve received lots of great feedback from entrepreneurs and direct marketers I respect highly.
And generated lots of replies and started great convos.
So what’s the lesson?
Are you communicating to your list as often as you should be?
It’s as simple as that.
Take a few minutes today and ask, “How could I make more deposits in my followers’ emotional bank account and increase my revenue at the same time?”
That’s $1,000 per hour work.
If you do, then next year this time you’ll look back on January 10th, 2023 and say, “Wow, I’m glad I did that!”
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The bigger your list, the greater the business case for sending a regular email to your list. Sure, Perry perhaps has a bigger list than you do. But the business case for emailing more regularly usually holds water.
So how often should you email? By my reckoning the business case looks something like this:
< 500 contacts: weekly email
501 – 1,500 contacts: 2-3 emails per week
1,501+ contacts: 5-7 emails per week
That’s generally where I’ve seen a return. To be clear, I’m talking real, opted-in engaged subscribers, not the overall list size vanity metric.
I worked with a company a few years ago who ‘boasted’ a 100,000+ email list size (they literally did boast about it). However when we got to work, only 23,000 of those contacts were opted in. Of those contacts, only 13,000 had engaged recently with any email.
Still, 13,000 engaged contacts is enough to grow your business in any way you like. It’s well above the threshold that makes a daily email more than worthwhile.
So what should you do if you only have say 100 engaged contacts on your list? Well firstly the main bottleneck is list growth. You should focus on growth as your top priority. However on top of that you do want to send something new of value each month. Usually I’d suggest 2-4 emails, or one longer piece which you also offer as a print newsletter. If you send a print version to 20 contacts every month for six months and 1 becomes a client, then it’s worth doing.
Sending something new on an ongoing basis – even once a month – allows you to build your body of work. Each piece you can then repurpose into social posts (for list growth), blog posts (for SEO), and ultimately into a book (for authority and positioning).
For support with this please have a read here.
Rob
P.S. You can subscribe to Perry’s daily emails here.