Ep. 35 - How to Build a Permission-Based Email List

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It's time for episode 35 in the Vyral Marketing Show.
You are going to learn how to build
a permission-based email list.
(upbeat music)
So welcome back!
It's episode 35 of the Vyral Marketing Show.
I am Frank Klesitz,
your host and the co founder of Vryal Marketing.
Where it's our mission,
here on the show,
to help you attract business, attract clients,
by publishing educational information online
so people find you,
and you stay in touch with your database,
and people get to know you online
by spending time online with you.
Which makes it so much more easier to do business
when you're talking to people you know,
than people that you don't.
When more importantly, people who know you,
is what really scales.
You know, a really good database,
goes beyond just the people you know,
it's the people who know you.
Which you can do by scaling yourself
by getting on video
and doing stuff like I do here on my show.
Which we do for our Vyral clients here.
And before I get into the show today,
where we're gonna talk about how to build
a permission-based email list,
not some spam list,
not some list of emails that you rip off online,
or some emails that you kind of questionably generate,
let's say online, at what they really opted in for.
I mean a real permission-based email list
of people who are excited,
and want to hear from you.
Because that's where email marketing is heading.
Is that if you don't have permission
from people to email them,
it is getting more difficult, it is hard.
Email service provider's terms of service
are strengthening up,
they are auditing their lists,
and if you don't have a permission-based
email acquisition strategy in place,
the world is moving forward not in your favor
to be able to do your email marketing.
One of the questions we've been getting
a lot here at Vyral is,
"how do I build really a solid
"permission-based email list?"
So everyone that you email actually wants to hear from you.
It's a lot simpler than you think.
It just requires a little different change in your strategy,
that's what we're gonna cover today.
And that's actually one of the steps
of our official video marketing plan
that you can go to the homepage of our website,
www.getvyral.com,
and download the Official Video Marketing Plan.
It's the plan we recommend for you,
and the plan that we implement for all of our clients
here at Vyral Marketing,
to help you reconnect with your number one business asset.
I say this every show,
do you know what it is?
Your database!
It's your clients, it's your past clients,
it's your sense of influence,
it's all those people that you've known,
you built a relationship with over the years.
What are you doing to stay in touch with them?
We have to reconnect with that list,
that plan goes through reconnecting with your list,
adding people to your list,
communicating with your list,
and then proactively making offers to it,
or calling the people who are engaged for business.
Step number two of the Official Video Marketing Plan
that you go download and read,
is about how to build your list.
Now I wanna give you a little update.
I wanna update the material.
I'll be rewriting the Official Video Marketing Plan
in the coming months for version two.
I wanna give you a little preview
of the section of what you need to do
to build a permission-based email list.
That is what we're gonna cover today.
So, let's get right into it.
Now, for the longest time at Vyral,
we started the firm maybe in 2007,
no, I'm sorry, 2009 is when we started our firm.
You know, as long as you had an existing relationship
in some way, where people knew you,
or you were connected with them,
it was fine to email somebody.
That was the standard.
But here's the deal,
the terms of use of email service providers,
the email service provider we use now
at Vryal Marketing who's wonderful, is Emma.
You could actually go checkout Emma online,
E-M-M-A,
I believe they're based out of Nashville.
And that's the account that you get
as a Vryal Marketing client,
we load your emails into a Emma account,
and we send your emails through them
as a service provider, they're fantastic.
But now it's getting more strict
of who you can actually email.
The highest standard I can give you
is that you've had recent permission to email somebody.
So I'm not gonna get into today reconnecting with your list
of who you had permission with and not.
I wanna talk today about adding people to your list.
If there is anything that you can do,
to get the best results on the Vyral Marketing Plan,
it's actually not create great videos,
it's building a strong list.
You can send a poor video that isn't that good
out to a great list of relationships,
and you'd get response.
You can send a great video out to a poor list,
and still get bad response.
All right?
So the most important thing you do is build your list.
Let me give you a couple tips,
let me get into it,
let me teach you today, follow me,
of exactly what you have to do to build
a permission-based email list
of people who want to hear from you.
Because my goodness, that is a valuable asset,
that you can monetize.
People will call you.
People will do business with you.
So let's get started.
My first question to you would be,
is how many people do you speak with about what you do?
Think about it.
Think about all the people you speak with during the day.
On your appointments,
maybe you're doing lead follow up,
maybe you're prospecting,
maybe you're at an event,
whatever your cup of tea is of
how you go about talking to people,
how many people do you talk to a week about what you do?
Or, more importantly, if you have a team,
or you have a firm,
how many people in your firm,
how many people does your firm talk to a week?
Think of all those opportunities,
and think of how much work it goes in
to make those conversations happen.
Right?
Well, here's all I challenge you to do.
At the end of every existing conversation
that you're already having,
whether it's with a client, a customer,
a prospect, whatever it may be,
all you have to do at the very end
is offer them a free subscription to your newsletter.
Got it?
Offer them a free subscription to your newsletter.
And by your newsletter, I mean your video blog,
your video emails, whatever it may be.
But I think newsletter people can really resonate with,
cause that's really what you're doing,
you're publishing a newsletter twice a month.
Here's how the script goes,
Hey, it was great speaking with you,
by the way we publish this newsletter
that helps solve this problem.
I'd really like to give you a subscription,
it's totally for free.
If I could get your email address I'll send it to you.
We publish it twice a month.
It's full of really useful tips,
and the videos are great.
What's your best email address?
I wanna give you a free subscription to our newsletter.
And you would personalize that for your industry.
If you could just somehow lead your team,
or remind yourself by putting like,
a big giant sign in front of your computer or phone.
I want you to think about
all of the missed opportunities you've had
by all the conversations you
or your team has been having,
because you're not asking permission to stay in touch.
Look, if you're going out and
you're talking to people,
and you're only looking for people
who want to do business now,
that's like 3%, let's say,
of the conversations you're gonna have
of people ready to do business now.
Most people will do business with you later on,
and they'd be happy to have a relationship with you.
If you could just ask for permission to stay in touch,
if you can offer a free subscription to your newsletter
at the end of every conversation,
that one thing is what takes businesses
that sputter along like this,
the businesses who actually start building an email list
get more come work with me inbound calls over time.
And it's not that expensive,
whether you have a database of 100 people,
1,000 people, or 10,000 people,
it's pretty much the same,
short some email credits to get the message out.
So how valuable is a permission-based list?
So think about, if you're talking to 100 people a week,
let's just say a third of people say,
"yeah, absolutely, send me your newsletter."
That's 30 people a week!
One... twenty a month?
One two three four six seven ...
Yeah, 120 a month.
You know, that scales up overtime
of all the people you're adding to your list.
Here's what I want you to do,
if you have a team, okay?
If you have a team,
when you do your team meetings,
or your meeting with yourself,
if you're a team of one,
you probably track in some way how many dials we've made,
how many contacts we made,
how many appointments we've set,
how many contracts we got signed,
how many customers we have,
and how many referrals did we get?
Something like that is probably in your team meeting.
Those are the metrics that drive business.
Some type of sales meeting like that.
Here's what I challenge you to do.
I want you to add another key performance metric
to your sales meeting.
It's not just dials and contacts and appointments,
here's the order,
it's dials, contacts, permission,
then appointments.
You see when you speak to somebody,
if they're not ready to do business now,
or really for any reason for that matter,
you wanna make sure you have permission to stay in touch.
And if you already do,
re-ask for permission to stay in touch.
And every time that you get an email address,
or you get permission from staying in touch,
that is a valuable asset.
All right?
How much permission did we get this week?
Is a question you wanna ask yourself and your team.
It could be 30 people, 40 people, 50 people,
think of how that's going to compound over time.
How much does this cost you?
How much does cost you to add this
email acquisition strategy in your business?
Nothing.
Just a little bit of focus, that is a cost,
but just a little bit of focus
to make sure that you're doing this
is like the biggest thing that you could do
to get better results with Vyral Marketing,
is making sure you give us a strong
and powerful list of people who wanna hear from you.
And that is one of the best ways to do it.
Now, let me give you a little side tip.
All right?
Here's what normally happens
with many of you who are clients.
You're building your database,
you're asking for email addresses,
you're asking for permission and you get it,
and it goes in your database.
And it's not until two, four,
sometimes five, six weeks later,
they get their first message from you
when your video goes up.
Now do you think that person you spoke with
five weeks ago, lets say, remembers
what the heck this video is?
No, they don't.
So I wanna ask you a question.
When you go opt in on an online form,
when you go to a form online,
you put your email address in,
for anything really, for that matter,
what's the next thing that happens?
Well, you get a subscription confirmation email, don't you?
You put your email address in,
then boom in your email inbox right away, boom!
Subscription confirmed,
or, hey, here's what you asked for, etc.
One of the things I'm gonna write
in the new Official Video Marketing Plan,
is making sure you and all of our clients
have a great, and outstanding,
subscription confirmation email.
If you get 60 email addresses over the phone,
or even could do them through an email chat,
or a text chat,
you get permission to stay in touch,
you wanna make sure that once you add
that person to your database,
a subscription confirmation email
is sent to them right away.
You can get these cool plug-ins for your email browser,
like on Gmail, that have templates,
where all you have to do is pull up
a new email in Gmail, click insert template,
click send, that's your subscription confirmation email.
That confirmation email, by the way,
is the number one opened and clicked email
of any type of message in internet marketing.
So the email that goes out after there's verbal permission,
or online permission,
let's say for an opt in, or a subscription,
when the confirmation goes out,
it is the most opened
and most clicked email of anything.
So make sure that email looks amazing.
I want your picture there,
let's get pictures of you and your firm,
let's get all your reviews in there,
let's include a link to your blog,
a link to your YouTube.
Let's include your backstory of who you are
and who you help,
and a call to action to do business with you.
Make sure that goes out
so someone can be on the phone with you,
maybe they don't know you that well,
that subscription confirmation email goes through,
they open it, boom!
They see you on there.
That's something you wanna put in place.
My first answer,
to how to build a permission-based email list,
is just start asking permission
from your existing conversations.
And making sure you get permission,
you offer your free newsletter,
make sure right away a subscription confirmation
goes out right away,
that you can fire off like an email template
in your email browser,
or your email program, rather,
and that's gonna solidify the people in your database.
And now that you continue to get your newsletter
that goes out, on the Vyral Marketing Plan.
What does that cost you?
Just some focus and time.
Doesn't cost you any money.
All right?
Now there's a problem with everything I just said.
(laughing) Okay?
There's a problem with everything I just said.
You see, in order to get sales,
you have to be marketing to your target market.
And for many of you, you're not necessarily talking
to the people in your target market all day long.
You have random people calling you that will never hire you.
You're at events with people that will never hire you,
and you're building a database,
you're getting permission from people to stay in touch,
but you're not building a database
of people that have, lets say,
the means, or necessarily the need,
to give you money.
And that's a problem.
We have many real estate clients,
here at Vyral Marketing,
you might be in real estate watching this.
And they're not building a database of homeowners
in high turnover neighborhoods that need to sell their home,
they're building a database of a bunch of
random buyer leads all over the country,
and people opting in online,
that think about buying a home,
that really have no intent.
Now which database,
or which list of permission would you rather have?
Would your rather have a list of a bunch of random people
that have no interest in what you do, really,
or no ability to buy or hire you?
Or one, lets say if you're a real estate agent,
it's a ridiculous question,
but a bunch of homeowners in a high turnover neighborhood,
that are likely to hire you?
Well, you would pick the latter.
Okay.
So here's the second step,
in order to build a great permission-based list,
not only do you need to be asking permission
from people to stay in touch,
with your subscription confirmation email,
but you also need to pick a target market,
and buy a list or compile a list
of the people in your target market.
I will use real estate for an example.
If you are a real estate agent,
you need to pick a farm.
And a farm is a specific part of town
of homes that you wanna sell,
of homeowners you want to build a relationship with.
And the size of your farm is simply
dependent upon your resources.
If you're broke and you don't have any money,
or really any time,
your farm could be a..
(laughing)
a street of homes, right?
And as your resources expand,
that farm can get bigger.
That's usually what happens.
Someone starts off, they have a small farm,
they get some money,
and they slowly expand that farm.
That's called attacking on a narrow front.
They talk about that in The Art of War,
which is a book that was written a very long time ago.
But when you have limited resources,
you have to attack on a narrow front.
So here's what I'm getting at,
you need a strategy to get in front of your target market.
And your target market may not know any idea who you are,
and you may not even have a plan
of how you're gonna go about talking to them.
So your other conversations are happening
through your existing means, okay?
But to go after a whole new market
of people that don't know who you are,
to break in, lets say into a farm,
or any target market, for that matter,
that's very difficult.
How do you get in front of them?
Now, there's different strategies,
you can cold call them,
you can go knock on their doors,
all right?
You can direct mail them,
there's lots of different ways.
But let me give you a message
that makes it so much easier to reach out
to a cold list of people.
And the strategy is, invite them to an event.
You see when you invite someone to an event,
it's a great reason to reach out.
It's like, oh, that's very nice.
In the case of this farm,
you create a seller workshop where you're gonna teach people
how you're gonna sell their home.
You create, you know,
this party at the community center, whatever it is.
Or maybe you have a...
A couple weekends from now you're gonna have a...
A block party, or some type of garage sale.
Whatever the event is.
And your reason for reaching out,
the reason for maybe just emailing them one on one,
for calling them, for stopping by,
for doing any advertising is come to the event.
It could be an open house if you're a real estate agent.
The point is, you get a cold market to an event.
It's so much more easy to make that happen.
And now when you meet all the people at the event,
get all their contact information
to bring them into your list.
And that way you have a very strong way
of building relationships with total strangers,
that are actually strong,
cause they all came to a one to many event,
and bring them on your list.
And what's beautiful about event marketing,
and why you're going to include this,
it's a great strategy to break into a cold target market is,
it's much easier to lead with a secondary offer,
into a cold market,
rather than a primary offer.
Let me explain.
A primary offer would be,
"do you wanna hire Vyral Marketing?"
But instead a secondary offer is,
"Come to one of our workshops, watch the show."
It's much easier to get someone
to come to a low cost workshop
or watch the show,
than to say my primary offer of, "Hire Vyral Marketing."
I'll go back to the real estate agent.
Your primary offer is,
"Hire me to sell your house."
But you can't just walk around
to a bunch of strangers saying,
"Do you wanna sell your home?"
"Do you wanna sell your home?"
I'm sure it works, if you ask enough people,
but it's certainly not very enjoyable a way
to build a business, all right?
It's much easier to go into a cold market
with an invitation to an event,
an excuse to start a conversation, if you will.
It's also a lot easier to hire people
to do that for you, to invite to an event.
It's much easier to hire people to
make a secondary offer to a market,
than it is go around making the primary offer.
Okay?
So, let me recap.
Here's how to build a permission-based email list.
Number one, start asking permission to stay in touch.
Start offering your video newsletter,
your twice a month video newsletter,
on the Official Marketing Plan,
to everyone you speak with,
or everyone your team speaks with.
Encourage your team to do it, you know?
Then, make sure you have a subscription confirmation email
that goes out right away.
That's the first way.
The second way,
go purchase, go build,
a list of your target market,
and get some way,
pick your choice of how you wanna get in front of them,
direct mail, calls, messaging,
Facebook ads, whatever,
but focus on a target market.
And the size of that target market is based upon
the resources that you have.
Start small if you don't have much.
And get a plan in place to reach out to them
and introduce yourself,
and get them to an event.
People will come if your event solves a problem
or connects the community.
And then at the event,
that's how you meet people
and bring them into your database.
That is how you build a business.
Not running around like a sales person
with your head chopped off,
trying to chase the next deal.
Okay?
And that's how you go from chasing business,
to attracting business.
So that's what we're all about here at Vyral Marketing.
So I challenge you to end watching this episode,
to think about what are you doing to build
a permission-based list?
What are you doing to gather contact information
of people who want to hear from you
so you can send them your educational content.
So people spend time with you online,
and either one, people call you to do business,
or when you call them they have a conversation with you,
and it's very easy to find out
if they have a need that you can solve.
All right?
So my name's Frank Klesitz,
I wanna thank you so much for watching this show.
If you liked this episode,
you wanna watch more episodes,
we're up on iTunes,
you can go to Facebook,
we're also on YouTube.
And if you go to our website
and scroll all the way down to the bottom,
you can put your email address in
you can subscribe to my newsletter,
by putting your email address in.
And I'm sure you'll get a subscription confirmation email,
so maybe you can model that, of how that works.
All right, I can capture your email address
by you putting it on the website.
We also capture an email address by talking on the phone,
same subscription confirmation email.
You can go there and opt in,
and if you have any questions you'd like
to answer for me on this show,
just go to www.getvyral.com/ask.
My producer Peter, who is right behind the camera,
will reach out to you,
and see if I can answer a question for you on the show.
So thank you so much for watching,
we'll see you in the next show.
(upbeat music)
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Ep. 35 - How to Build a Permission-Based Email List

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