Deep down you know what needs to be done in your business. Sometimes I don’t do them (they don’t seem important, they don’t scale, could it fail, among others). These are all bad excuses.
Here is the story of how we forced ourselves to do the right things consistently:
Our email list was growing at about 100-400 emails a day from potential customers either opting in or buying.
The Issue:
Our customer was building and we’d email them now and then…a promotion…a survey…then 2-3 weeks would slip by with no emails. Why?
I knew these relationships were the whole basis of the business, they were people who had bought from us already! I was focused on building/scaling the customer list and not taking relationships with my current customers to the next level. Whoops.
This was the old affiliate marketer coming out in me…we got the ROI on ad spend so we were profiting while growing the customer list. Emails was just a side bonus so I wasn’t taking it seriously (even though the reason I started this was to get away from affiliate marketing and to build a true asset).
Dang habits coming back to get me!
It was actually worst than that…when we would email our abuse and unsubscribes were huge. I even got a warning from Mailchimp. These were real people who trusted us enough to buy or opted in a few weeks ago now marking us as spam. I can’t blame them. We’d disappear then pop up with an email asking them to buy again…how selfish!
The Changes:
We made a promise to each individual person, we’ll send out our VIP emails every Tuesday and Friday. We told them in the welcome email exactly what to expect. So now they knew what to expect and they got regular emails from us…keeping that relationship warm.
At the top of each email, we added a quick reminder of who we are, why they are getting this email and detailed instructions on how to unsubscribe if they wish.
The Results:
Abuse reports went down, unsubscribes went down and open and click rates went up, and best of all sales went up! Thanks to making a promise and keeping it. On top of that, it’s motivating…seeing the list growing, staying active, and producing more repeat customers and sales.
We solved our consistency problem. Lifetime value continued to rise, and I had fought off the affiliate / easy route marketing brain for now!
Use your customers and make a promise you HAVE to keep!