email

I've been on a reading binge and I'm loving it. From the Big Moo to Getting Business to Come to You, it's new media to traditional marketing and niche development in between. It's been fascinating and relevant. One of the questions that came up in today's teleclass on Effective Email Campaigns was, "What's the difference between a feature and a benefit?" The short answer is: features are intrinsic to the product or service, benefits are extrinsic—they're about the consumer.

Clear as mud? Let's take a closer look at what that really means. Chapter 5 of Getting Business to Come to You has a whole list of features and benefits that really made sense to me of what the difference was. Let's take a look at a few examples:

• Feature/Fact: The accountant is a CPA.
  Benefit: You can rely on her knowledge. You won't go to jail or lose everything you have.
• Feature/Fact: The milk is pasteurized.
  Benefit: Your family won't get sick.
• Feature/Fact: The milk is raw.
  Benefit: Insert your perceived benefit here.
• Feature/Fact: The cleaning service is bonded.
  Benefit: You don't have to worry about theft or damage.
• Feature/Fact: The flatware is sterling.
  Benefit: You'll impress your guests, you'll feel more important, you'll enjoy its beauty.

Benefits are highly personal. For example, let's take a look at the benefits a potential customer looks for when buying a car...

• It wasn't the gas mileage; it was the additional money you'll have each month to spend on something else.
• It wasn't the colour; it was how the colour makes you feel (excited, sophisticated, elegant).
• It wasn't the car's image; it was how you'll appear to other people by owning this car: successful, economical, young, carefree.
• It wasn't the engine's power; it was the sense of power you feel as you accelerate.

A throat lozenge salesman isn't selling to soothe sore throats; he's selling revenue to pharmacies. The features of the throat lozenge are the same regardless of the audience you're selling, but the benefits belong to the consumer of that stage of the sales cycle. Compare benefit shopping to expert shoppers who are feature shopping. Describing the benefit of, "Healthy Gourmet Food" is useless to an expert shopper who is looking for the specific features: "Low fat, no wheat, no dairy."

Your customers aren't stupid, they're just busy. You need to make it really easy for them to buy from you. You want to help them by educating them on the benefits of your product, and by asking them to realize the benefits available to them by shopping with you. The ask is important. If you don't feel confident enough in your services and products to ask qualified buyers to purchase them, why would they buy from you?

Have you ever signed up for a self-directed email class? If you have you know what I'm talking about and you can skip to the next paragraph, but if you haven't, here's how it works: you register for a class and then over the course of several days (or possibly weeks) you get an email with the lessons for that time period. The ezines we talked about in Personal correspondence in bulk, are sent to the entire list at the same time—it could be immediate, or some time in the future, but the key here is that it's always at the same time.

An autoresponder, on the other hand, does not send an email to the entire list at the same time. It sends out emails one at a time based on the number of days a person has been subscribed to the list. As the author of the email lessons you can "set it and forget it." You write each of the daily messages and then let the autoresponder take care of the rest.

For example: a five-day class needs to have today's lesson, and four days of "tomorrow's" lesson. On Day 1 (or Day zero, depending on how you count), the student register for the class and is subscribed to the autoresponder. The first message is sent out. This might be a welcome message preparing the student for the class including any background reading they need to do, or you could simply launch into the first lesson. On day two, the autoresponder once again sends out an email, but this time it sends out a different email which contains the next lesson. And every day after that for the duration of the class, the autoresponder sends out a new email with the next bit of information for the student.

Every time a new student subscribes to the class, the autoresponder starts again. There's no need to be at your computer sending out individual emails! The autoresponder system takes care of that for you. Sound useful? You betcha it is!

You can do more than just classes though! How else could your business take advantage of autoresponders? Register for Effective Email Campaigns and find out. The class starts today!

Once you've master the art of personal correspondence it's time to move on to something a little bit more efficient. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will only let you send email to 20-50 people at a time. While this might be okay for planning a family reunion, it's not, as the big kids say, "scalable." If your distribution list has grown larger than a few dozen people, it's time to look at a bulk mailing system.

Most Web site hosting providers will also offer some kind of open source mailing system that allows you to send out bulk emails. It is typically Mailman or PHPList. I've used both and I think they're both good. But they're limited to what they can do.

Mailman is fantastic for sending email that looks like email. You literally prepare an email, send it to a special address, and the email is processed by mailman and sent to everyone on your distribution list. PHPList, on the other hand, is Web-based. You sign into a Web site and then write what seems like a Web page and then click send to have the Web site send an email to everyone on your distribution list.

If you're happy with plain emails and you know your distribution list is unlikely to grow more than a few hundred (or even a few thousand), these options are great. The Ginger Press uses mailman for their newsletter. Every issue is a wonderful, chatty message to its readers. It's not big on hype or The Sell or being slick or clever. It's just a really great newsletter from the owner of the bookshop to the inboxes of its customers.

Unfortunately the open source software packages don't offer as much polish as their commercial counterparts. It's as though the projects have been abandoned back in the days of the Web 1.0 (pre-Facebook). Commercial services now offer sophisticated tracking options to tell you how many people have opened your newsletter. They also offer elegant HTML templates that allow you to design your newsletter to look like a Web page.

Some of the well respected services include Constant Contact, Aweber and Emma (no affiliation). Within the Drupal community there's also been a lot of positive chatter about MailChimp, a relatively new player to the mass mailing game. And there are other systems too. A Web search for, "marketing email service" will find you even more services to compare.

Before making your final decision on which mailing system to use, be sure to ask a few questions:

• How much will it cost me to send out an email to my list? Are there pricing options that are more appropriate for my marketing plan? For example: some charge based on the number of emails sent; and others charge a flat fee for the month (within a given number of subscribers).
• Do they offer templates that suit your business, or will you need to pay a graphic designer to create a template for you?
• Does the administration area allow you to track statistics about each email you send out?
• Can you easily import AND export your contacts, or are you stuck with that system with no way of retrieving your contact database?
• Will the system integrate easily with your Web site? Will it be easy to add a customized, "sign up here" box to your Web site?

You may even want to ask a few of these questions to the company you're thinking about using to see how they treat you.

There's only one type of email left from The lingo of email marketing: auto responders. I'll talk about this marketing tool in an upcoming blog post. In the mean time, get ready to learn the "howto" of Effective Email Campaigns in my upcoming two-week course starting September 28th. You'll learn how to use each of these email marketing systems to attract new and repeat customers to your business. Space is limited so register now for Email Campaigns and Newsletters.

The first thing you need to do when creating an effective email campaign is get a handle on your own email. It will help you quiet your mind so that you can focus on your own business. There's been a lot of really great stuff written about handling email by Merlin Mann. If you don't know his work, hop on over to the Original Inbox Zero Articles. Based on Merlin's articles and also David Allen's Getting Things Done system.

I use the following process to keep my email under control:

1. Once or twice an hour I check my email to see if there is anything urgent, or anything that I can reply to within two minutes of hitting the reply button.
2. I reply to the things that need less than two minutes of time.
3. I delete the things that don't need or won't get more attention. For example: newsletters I'm subscribed to, emails I'm cc-d on, system notifications ("you just bought something at Amazon, we'll ship it later") and spam.
4. Things that I want to read in more detail later are saved to a topic folder.
5. Things that have a task associated with them get copied to a folder labelled TODO.
6. At least once a day I go through my TODO folder and choose tasks to complete so that I can remove the emails from that folder (after replying to them where relevant).
7. At the end of the day all emails that are currently in the inbox get moved to the TODO folder.

Easy, right? Now that you've got your email under control it's time to fill up someone else's inbox with your message.

The easiest way to get in touch with someone is through personal correspondence. Y'know: sending one email to one person. It's not very efficient as a mass marketing tool, but it does give you the practice you'll need to compose effective emails. Not sure what to say? Take Andrea Nierenberg's lead and start by saying thank you to your customers. Get yourself into the habit of writing emails that aren't about you, they're about your customer.

--

If your business is ready to start taking advantage of email communications register for Effective Email Campaigns. This two-week course starting September 28th will give you the "howto" you'll need to use email to attract new and repeat customers to your business. Space is limited so register now for Email Campaigns and Newsletters.