The number one lesson we can learn from the big social media outage
I have an honest confession to make. The day Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down, I didn’t even know until late in the afternoon. You see, social media is not a big part of my business or my personal life. And I firmly believe you don’t need these platforms to grow your business.
There is always money in the banana stand
If you watched the popular series Arrested Development you will remember the advice George Bluth gave to his son Michael, “there is always money in the banana stand.” Michael brushed him off thinking he was merely talking about the struggling family business, although the only asset making any money. In reality, he had $250k in cash lining the walls of the banana stand!
What would you do in your business with an extra $250k? I’m guessing it didn’t take you that long to answer that question.
Well, what if I told you your email list is a gold mine of revenue just waiting to be tapped into?
With the rise of digital marketing on social media platforms, I sense that many people have stopped paying attention to email as a major source of revenue. I’m here to tell you though that is a huge mistake.
How I increased my revenue 30% by ditching social media and emailing my list EVERY DAY
I spent 3 years running a direct-to-consumer CBD oil company Hemp Daddy’s Therapeutics that recently merged with its manufacturing partner One Farm.
During my time running Hemp Daddy’s I embarked on an interesting experiment where I turned off all social media, and only emailed my list. Although I did not literally email them every day. I did send them an email five days a week (on weekdays).
A few interesting things happened….my revenue grew 30% that month.
My email open rates INCREASED.
My engagement went through the roof. Not only were people clicking through my emails, but I also had people actually responding to the emails just to tell me they loved reading them.
And to give you more perspective, at the time of the merger with my manufacturing partner my repeat purchase rate was 70%!
But won’t I annoy people and make them unsubscribe?
This is a limiting and false belief that many entrepreneurs have. I recently spent six months doing some agency work. One of the things we helped our clients with was their email marketing efforts.
I was shocked that people with a list of 40k subscribers were only sending an email once a week and in some cases much less than that. Why put that much energy into growing a list if you are never going to use it?
There was always this fear that “I’m going to annoy people.”
I’m here to tell you that is not true. If somebody voluntarily gave you their email they want to hear from you.
My 30 days of daily email experiment proves this point. I had very few unsubscribes, and out of those even a few of them messaged me to tell me it was too much for them but they would continue to buy my products.
Others genuinely didn’t want to hear from me, but that is okay. Don’t fear unsubscribes. All it means is that person was not your perfect customer. Remember that you pay for the number of subscribers on your list, so you want to make sure the people that stay on your list will buy from you.
The secret to emailing your list daily
There is a secret to emailing your list more frequently though. It’s actually very simple. So simple it’s going to sound dumb, but the secret is to tell stories and send quality content.
When I was messaging my list daily, I would simply tell a story about something that happened in my own life, and then relate that to CBD oil and how it can help them.
A simple example of this is, I told a story about how I threw my back out at the airport coming back home from a freelance photography assignment, and how that back injury resulted in months of pain. I then transitioned into how I wish I had CBD oil back then to help with the discomfort and inflammation.
This method might be a little challenging for some brands, but there are still ways to make it work. Here are a few other content ideas you can rotate through to email your list daily:
- A weekly letter from the founder. One aspect of my daily emails that made them perform so well is that people felt they were getting to know ME, the brand owner.
- Purpose Driven Emails. These are emails that educate your customers about the purpose of your brand. These can be especially effective if you and your perfect customer align with your core beliefs. Think Patagonia and their passion for environmentalism.
- Repurpose old content. One way I was able to continue my habit of daily emails was that I would re-use old emails and tweak them a bit before sending them. Most people will never know it was re-used.
- Educate. A large majority of my emails were educating users about the product itself, the brand, our sourcing practices, and other things related to my target audience of ultra runners.
And these are just a few examples.
There is a lot of other low-hanging fruit brands and marketers are not using when it comes to email marketing, such as list building, automation, and sales funnels.
Email marketing is a gold mine. If this is something you have struggled with in the past let me know in the comments. I would love to know what your biggest struggle or challenge has been when it comes to email marketing.
Or maybe you are like me and have seen a lot of success with email. If that is you I want to hear from you as well. Share your story in the comments.
