Dave Watson’s Tips…

• When you’re doing email marketing, you can follow the same rules as the big companies do.
• 99% of people still check their email every day. Email is still the core of it all.
• The key thing here is staying in touch with people.
• You can increase your open rate by 20% to a 30% just by doing a resend a couple of days later to do not opens.
• You want to write engaging emails that people respond to.
• Call your bounce backs to improve sales
• When you’re out there networking and doing it, have a follow-up program.

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Doug: Welcome back, listeners. Today, I’ve got a special guest in the studio. I’ve got Dave Watson. Dave has been in sales and marketing for over 25 years. He brings experience from the corporate world helping small businesses with their online marketing solutions. He has worked with his clients to help them grow their business through email marketing and integrating social media, blogs, website, and SEO to maximize their online marketing efforts. Along with being a leading partner, a service provider with Constant Contact since 2006, Dave has worked with many of the major email marketing services over the past 12 years. Dave, welcome to the Real Marketing Podcast.

Dave: Thanks, Doug. Glad to be on with you.

Doug: Super excited to talk about email. I love email, email marketing, and my listeners probably know that by just looking at how many of our podcasts are about email. You and I were chatting a little bit offline and looking at all the channels that are out there today, all the social channels and video, I guess one of the questions that you had mentioned was why are we still using email today?

Dave: Yeah, I get that question asked a lot, Doug, and I do a number of local presentations here in Vancouver, a lot of webinars, and we always like to start off with that “why email” because there are so many options today. People you referred to before say, “Isn’t email dead?” I think at one point when all the social media tools were coming in, there were other options for people and people were getting tired of emails and the social media tools, it took them away to somewhere else, but in a way, it’s come full circle.

When I do get a group together, I like to ask them, especially if it’s a morning session, I always like to start off by asking them where have you been today? How many people have been on Facebook and if we got a group of say 20, 30 people in the crowd, about half at least will put up their hand, sometimes even more. You ask the same question about Instagram and LinkedIn, the numbers are a little bit less, and Twitter and a few other ones that are kicking around, and you ask people where they’ve been, but then you ask them how many people check their email?

Doug: Good question.

Dave: There’s always one guy that hasn’t, but pretty well 99% of people checked their email that day. It’s not surprising. I figure email has turned into a social tool. It used to be email and social, but email is really a social tool. You’re going into someone’s personal space. The same way that you’re entering their social sites, you’re going to their email inbox. The strange thing about it is for someone to open up a social account, what do they need to have?

Doug:  Yeah, got have an email account.

Dave: Got to have an email, yeah. What’s your username is usually your email to start off? Email is still the core of it all. One study said that if you add it up, everybody in all the social sites, it would pretty well add up to all the emails in the world. Facebook might have 60% of them, and LinkedIn might have another 10%, and Twitter might have another 15%. The other ones are scatterings of them all, but not everybody’s on Facebook. Not everybody’s on LinkedIn. Not everybody’s on Twitter, but everybody has an email.

Doug:  If you want me to send you money electronically, I still need to email you the link to, I send you Interac transfer. I think people are still happy to get those.

Dave:  That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, the transfers go a long way and so email is still the core of it all.

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Doug: What’s interesting is I was looking at … There’s been a big discussion, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, I’m not sure how active you are at Facebook, talking about Facebook and changing the algorithm. I’ve seen what my friends are posting and then I’ve seen the newsletters that I subscribe to in the marketing space talking about the algorithms and the fact that … people are complaining that Facebook is screening and reducing the visibility of their post to their friends.

Dave: They definitely are and what Facebook is after now … Facebook’s never asked for any money from anybody, which is nice of them, but if you have X amount of friends in there, there’s only a small percentage, maybe 10, 15% that are going to see your post. The more they interact with you, sure, the more they’re going to see your post, but just drop somebody off the other end of your viewing spectrum as well. Now Facebook, especially when it comes to businesses, they want businesses to start paying for the ads.

Doug:  Yes, they do.

Dave: Which is good. I’ve always said if Facebook charged everybody a buck, they’d be rich and everybody would sign up for Facebook for a buck a year, right, they’d get their-

Doug: That’s right.

Dave: They’d get their millions and millions that way, but the thing is they are going after businesses for the most part. It’s still free for the public, which is what it was originally intended to do anyway. They are limiting … Right away, you’re limited to who can see your post, unless you want to boost it. To boost it these days cost money.

Doug:  The other thing too is you have to consider and it’s not just Facebook, but a lot of the social platforms if you do want to advertise, they heavily screen the content. I’m not suggesting that anybody that we’re working with or that’s listening is going to send out content that would be inappropriate or hate-related, but it doesn’t need to be inappropriate for Facebook to ban your ad. It just needs a few people to say, “I don’t like your ad” and now your ads don’t display.

Dave: Yeah, and in fairness to Facebook, deep down, it’s probably the core of the rule is good and it’s meant to be good, but as I say, there can be just a few small little glitches in there that people can complain and then, your ad doesn’t go out. We got to remember with Facebook, it’s their rules and they’re going to change it. They change their rules … Think back when Facebook came out, even [inaudible 00:05:55] people started to get active probably maybe 8 to 10 years ago, they were changing it all … As soon as someone had to figure it out, they change it. Same thing here.

Doug: No different than the search engines, yeah.

Dave: Google doesn’t [inaudible 00:06:05]. They don’t want the people to become complacent with it. They want people to just stay on top of the latest trends so they’re going to change the rules and see who’s following and paying attention.

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Doug: Let’s focus on what we really want to talk about and that shares a success or a breakthrough that you’ve had with either your company or with a client using email, email marketing for them.

Dave:  I would say one of my biggest [successes 00:06:32] came earlier on when I left the corporate world. Number one, my wife was doing sales and marketing for a number of companies and US-based companies, and I was getting tired of the corporate world and so I switched over and gave her a little bit of a hand. The next thing you know, I was doing a couple newsletters for her clients and a big success because I was doing emails even back when I was working in the corporate world, but we never called it email marketing. We just called it sending out emails.

Just in my business, I started doing a few emails and another company asked me. Then I started just reaching out to a few people and within a short period of time, had a dozen customers. I said to myself, “Wow, this is a pretty good business to be in just to help people out with their email marketing.” Because you think about it, back then 10, 12 years ago, emails, people weren’t using properly for marketing. The big companies all were, but the small companies still thought that email was too intrusive for them. It took a lot of education to get companies onboard, just even explaining what the hell email marketing is.

Doug: Yeah, that’s right.

Dave:  Along came companies like Constant Contact and other service providers, Get Response and Vertical Response, and things like that, and they started really promoting to the general public. I would say my success in my company is just built from staying with it and now you look at it today, and email marketing is a norm in most companies. Most companies don’t really survive without it and the ones that don’t, it’s like the same people that don’t have a website. Maybe they’re not doing any email marketing as well. There are certain core things you should be doing and email marketing is one. The success of my company it’s all online marketing, but 95% of my clients are doing email marketing as well.

Doug: I think the other thing that you mentioned that’s really interesting, too, is when you look at a lot of the tactics that larger companies would use to grow their business and the budgets they would use to spend on advertising or marketing, whether it’s traditional media or banners or social, is that it’s still a relatively inexpensive tool so it really levels the playing field for any business, small businesses or startup. If you produce good content, and you can get subscribers to sign up for your newsletter, and you can continue to serve them and show them your expertise, you’re going to be able to convert some of those guys and compete at an international level.

Dave:  Yeah. They don’t know if you’re a one-man show, a five-man show, a 10-man show. If you’ve got … When you’re doing email marketing, you can follow the same rules as the big companies do. You still have to grow your list. Some of the bigger companies obviously might have more ways to do that, but the process is the same. If you keep your branding well and when they look at your stuff, your information comes in, if it looks good and looks professional, the content is good, it’s relevant. You can compete with the big guys.

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Doug: What do you think is one of the biggest reasons that people don’t embrace this? They’ve got a business. They’ve got a website. They’ve got a bunch of social media, but you go to … I was talking to a PR agency last week and I’ve known the owner for a long time and the comment that came back from her was, “Hey, you should really help me set up email marketing. I’m not doing any of that.” I took a look at her site. She had just rebranded her site and she doesn’t have a signup. I need to ask you that question, too, is why after being in business for 15 years don’t you at least have a signup? What’s been your experience the reason why people haven’t done that or taken that, at least that basic first step?

Dave: That’s a good question because that’s what I present to people and as I say, a lot of companies are on board with email marketing and the ones that still aren’t, I have a hard time wondering why not. In other words, everybody has contacts and obviously, a smaller company, sure, they don’t need it, they’ve got a dozen customers that they’re keeping in touch with, but for the most part, people, everything from a real estate agent to even if they have a couple hundred people in their database is enough to have a good real estate business on.

The key thing here is staying in touch with people. Some people think, number one, they go back to the idea where they think it’s intrusive or they think that email’s just impolite or it was a change from writing a letter, but nobody writes letters anymore anyway. It’s a question of email should fit into it because they all have contacts. They all have clients and they all have prospects. What I find for the most part is people don’t have the time or the expertise. They know they should be doing it. Companies say, “Yeah, we know we should be doing it.” When someone does hire me on and I ask them, “Why are you hiring me?” It’s because they say, “We know we should be doing it. I’ve heard about it. I want to get it working. I want to get it up and running, but I don’t have the time or the expertise to do it.”

Doug:  That would include things like choosing an email service provider, getting it installed on their website so they can capture emails and then, maybe teach them how to load content and send to the list or would you do all of that work?

Dave: Exactly, exactly. One of my startup packages is just with the common thing is telling the client, “I’m going to work with you on your first email.” What that usually includes is a strategy session, a planning session. We talk about where are you going to get your content from, and we can talk about that a little bit later. Where do you get your emails from? Where do you get the emails from prospects? Are you out there networking? Do you have a signup box? What are you doing now? What could we put on your website? What could we talk to your salespeople about to grow your list?

Then I’ll work with them. I’ll get them set up on the proper email service provider, Constant Contact, there’s a number of them out there. I’ll get in to do the nitty-gritty stuff that they don’t … Help them upload their database, and then pick out a nice template for them, and put the branding onto the template, and work with them at least on their first newsletter. Then go over the tracking metrics with them, which we can talk about as well. Then if I’m working with someone in their staff or whatever or they got the capabilities to do it themselves, I’ll train them on it, spend a little bit of time. Then monitor with them for the next two, three emails. If they’re doing a great job, they’re on their own. If not, then they tend to keep me on longer. I’ve had companies who I’ve been doing this for over 10 years now.

Doug: Wow, that’s really good.

Dave: In other words, I’m just part of their team now. They’ve got their receptionist, they got their sales guys, and for a fraction of the price, they’ve got some guy doing their email marketing for them.

Doug: That’s really cool.

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Dave: It works out well that way, but still, there are people saying, “I just don’t see the value and I’m going to do Facebook ads or I’m going to be focusing on LinkedIn.” I agree. People can only focus in on a certain amount of things, but all in all, let’s say with my client base, 95% of them do emails because that’s the biggest bang for the buck.

Doug: The reason I like database marketing and I’d broaden it to database beyond emails, I’ve don’t a lot of direct mail for clients in the restaurant business and one of the things that we would do is we’d get them to pull out a calendar and we’d walk through their whole year, the busy times and the slow times. Then we’d convince them to build not only a direct mail database but an email database because it was really easy to say, “Okay, fine, we’re going to need a surge of sales in August because you’re slow.” To use your example, if I’m going to run a Facebook ad, I can’t reach my clients on a Facebook ad, all of them in August, but I know I can put a piece of mail in the mailbox or I can deliver an email to them that will absolutely drive traffic in the door.

Dave: Definitely, definitely. Yeah, ’cause I get clients who say, “Oh, I’m too busy right now. I don’t want to do the newsletter. I’m too busy because … ” Probably doing the newsletter brings them in a little bit of activity that they have to look after. Then they wonder why they’re seasonal. They wonder why, “Okay, now I’m in a slow part. Now I’ve got to rush to get some business,” or they’ve got an event that’s happening. The best time to plan an event is six months in advance, not two weeks in advance. The best time to [plan 00:15:05] your business for your slow season is during your busy season.

Doug: Yeah, that’s right, so it’s ready to go. How often do you recommend people mail? If you’ve come in and set this up on my website and I’m now starting to build a list, how often do you recommend somebody that’s just getting started? How often should they mail to the list?

Dave:  I think once a month is plenty for a general newsletter, for general companies. There are people that I do it more regularly for if you’ve got a restaurant or something. You’d want people to know what’s happening, your weekend specials and stuff, but for the most part, I’d say a month goes by pretty quick these days. For a general newsletter, once a month to touch base. We treat that newsletter pretty well as your electronic salesman. Instead of calling … You can’t reach out and call everybody once a month, but hey, that email, when you press a button, it’s going out to everybody, they’re going to see you in their inbox once a month, whether they read it or not, and maybe every two or three months they see it, but they’re going to touch base with you. They’re going to have that touch every few months.

Also in saying that a newsletter once a month, but then also I’d like to squeeze in another one or two one-off emails that are very specific to something. Maybe if I do work for an accountant, we’ve got the newsletter going out, but “Hey, just a reminder, your taxes are due March 31st or April 4,” so we can send off a one-off, so it’s very specific. It’s that extra touch, but it’s not really a long thing to read. It’s just a quick little headline and a couple lines, maybe a link back to the guy’s website, but you’re sending somebody out something specific there.

If you can get one to two touches a month, that’s plenty. Over a year, you take a look at it, 18 to 24 touches in a month is great because if you’re looking at a financial planner, they may call you twice a year.

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Doug:  I like that. I like your approach to looking at it over the year. Once or twice a month doesn’t sound like a lot, is up to 24 hours a year.

Dave:  Yeah. When you put out your email, you’re also posting on your social sites. Most of the top email service providers, as you hit the send button for your email, you can also pick your Facebook page, this article, I want it to go to LinkedIn, I want it to go to Twitter, and some type of other social sites, but those big three right off the bat, you’re posting your email out online to the social sites as well.

Doug: Because I’m talking to a peer who has lots of experience in email, what are you finding these days in terms of deliverability and opens? You said we talked a little bit about analytics. If people are listening going, “well, okay, I have 100 people on my list. How many am I going to expect to get delivered and opened?”

Dave:  If you send out your email through your Outlook or whatever, which some people still are doing, which is against CASL on the regulation rules, but you may get 80% deliverability. When you’re going through someone like a Constant Contact or Robly, you’re getting 97% deliverability. Right off the bat, you know pretty well your emails pretty well hit everybody.

When it comes to opens, opens rates vary depending on what type of business you’re in. Associations are going to get a lot higher rates and membership-based companies are going to get a lot higher because they know who the email’s coming from. For the general part, anywhere from 20, 25% is pretty good. What I like to recommend to my clients is if they send out the email and they get 20% and they send out an email on a Wednesday, let’s do a resend to the people that didn’t open it up and send it on the weekend. Overall, you can increase that open rate by 20% to a 30% just by doing a quick little resend a couple of days later to do not opens.

Also, what I’d like to tell them is you can’t fall in love with the open rate. What’s more important is the engagement, the click-throughs, and what people are clicking into. If you send out an email and you get 20% opens and nobody clicks through one, then you’ve got pretty well zero engagement. You want to have really good call to action. This day and age, you want to have your links nice and big ’cause people are looking at them on their mobiles. You want to have your whole email mobile friendly.

Doug:  Makes sense.

Dave: Having your call to actions right at the top where you want people to go so that they’re clicking through to where you want them next. I think of the email that you should get them off email as soon as possible to where you want them to go to. What action do you want them to take? Usually, that’s going to a landing page somewhere on your website or registration page for an event. Where do you want to take them? Then measure that as really your success.

Doug: Yeah, I think you’re right. The way I’ve often looked at it is there is we can’t do everything at once. We need to start with the basic. Do we have a good source of a good clean email, someone who wants to be on our list? Do we have a good sending reputation? Will it get delivered? Do we have a good subject line that is not only … There’s the compliance side for CASL in Canada and canned spam in the US, but more importantly, that didn’t deceive them or trick them to open. It wasn’t click-bait. Did they open it? When they opened it, is there something that’s valuable in there for them? Your call to action, is it going to enhance their life? I break them down to all those little teeny pieces and say, “Each one of them has a responsibility,” but you’re right, at the end of the day, if you’re not getting any engagement, then it’s like a lot of social media, you’re sending stuff out, but nobody’s listening.

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Dave:  Yeah, and you can see that on social media when someone posts something, they’ve got the zero likes, zero shares, zero comments. It was great for them to put it out there, but then you see [something 00:21:08] … I equate it to I do some work for accountants and the guy’s website’s very professional. His newsletter’s professional. His social sites for that matter are very professional, but every now and then, he puts the cat going down the stairs and with a ball of yarn, which one gets the most likes and comments and shares is not his tax tips.

Doug:  No. Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well.

Dave: People know at least that they’re human, but you can get away with that on social. That’s why I figure email is somewhere in between. You want to be professional, but you also want to let down the curtains a bit and let people know they’re human.

Doug: Yeah. No, fair enough. Yeah, I’ve often wondered how come everyone liked that post? That post was really ridiculous. I put out something that was really good and nobody even noticed it.

Dave: Yeah. It’s surprising sometimes with emails, of just a random subject line that we were hesitant about ends up getting the most opens, and the article gets the most click-throughs because it’s sometimes hard to predict what people are going to like.

Doug: I think the most successful subject line I wrote for an email last year … So my wife and I have a health wellness blog, and so she blogs twice a week, and we set up a newsletter and some people signed up, but we were really erratic in sending emails. She’s writing twice a week for a blog, which is a big commitment and so the email stuff just got ignored. The subject line that we tested was, “I’m sorry,” and that was the highest open rate we had and we just upfront, “Hey, I’m sorry. I promise you I would send you an email once a week, but as you can gather, I haven’t been doing that because I’ve been doing other stuff.” Anyhow, we went on to say, “We’re sorry that we didn’t make our commitment. Here’s what we’ve been doing and here’s some new information,” but that definitely had the most engagement out of any email we sent out for the entire year.

Dave:  Yeah, sometimes the old oops, I missed the [link via 00:23:04] emails are the most popular one.

Doug: Yeah. We didn’t do it intentionally. I get it though, but we didn’t do it intentionally. We seriously just hadn’t … Like you say, you’re busy with your business and yeah, but we need to do it, but we weren’t doing it.

Dave: Yeah, you can only send that one out once or so.

Doug: Yeah, that’s right. Although it works for the furniture stores, if you think of the time that you drive by, and I won’t mention them by name, how many times they have a going out of business sale or closing sale, I’d often tell people, “That’s why I don’t believe the word sale works anymore because nobody buys window coverings at full price because they’re always 60% off and there’s always a furniture store going out of business.”

Dave: Especially when it’s your third annual going out of business sale.

Doug: That’s right. Yeah. Looking at the space that we’re in today in the marketplace and how things are changing, what are you most excited about today as it relates to email and email marketing?

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Dave: With most of them, it’s the automation and personalization of followup emails that are in place now. Now most of the systems have in place that not only when you click through something or when you sign up for an email, you’re going to get an automated welcome letter and maybe a series of welcome letters to follow over a certain amount of time, but now within your regular monthly emails that you send out, if someone clicks on a link within the email, you can now automatically follow up with another email to that person. Which is great, especially if you’re selling products and stuff and the person’s clicked on something. Then, they’re going to get a couple series of automated follow-up emails. It takes it to another level of engagement with people. Because I always say the fortune’s in the followup and the more you can automate it, obviously, the easier it is for you.

Doug: Yeah. One of the things that I thought was interesting, there’s a marketing guy in the US that I follow, his name’s Frank [Kern 00:25:08] and when Frank sends out his email, he has a video often embedded in the email and it’s offering free information or content that his recipient would want. He doesn’t send them a sales offer if they don’t open that email and click on that video. His thinking is if they haven’t clicked on the video, then they’re obviously not interested in the topic so I’m not even going to make my pitch.

Dave: Right, right. You’re going to a more focused group. It’s like if you’re going to do an event and you put out your email and, just random number, 50 people click on the link and only seven people actually sign up for the event, where’s your best efforts spent from then on? It’s probably on the 43 people that at least showed some interest.

Doug:  Yeah, absolutely.

Dave:  Because someone might’ve clicked on a link and got distracted, they went to check something, they got busy and next thing you know, they’ve forgotten about you. Always I say to my clients back before the … Automation is good, but picking up the phone and calling someone too-

Doug: We did that. I won’t tell you the not for profit. It was a political event they were working on. We were doing a fundraiser and that’s exactly what we did. We sent an email out to their supporting list. We said, “Here, we’d like you to buy a table and come to this event.” The list that got the phone calls were the people who clicked on the link, went to the landing on the page, spent 30 seconds or more on the landing page, but didn’t buy a table.

Dave: Yeah. They want to find out why not-

Doug: Because we knew- Yeah, that’s exactly, but I said, “You need to be careful because you’ll spook people if you tell them that.” Maybe the conversation you have is, “Hey, I’m not sure if you received our email about this particular event,” but of course, you know they’ve received it, they’ve opened it, they’ve been to the landing page and for whatever reason, they didn’t buy and we actually oversold the event. It was a huge success by using some telemarketing combined with some analytics from the email.

Dave: This day and age, if you click on a link in an email, people know you did it. It’s not a secret, but it still is spooky. I say, “You don’t want to be big brother to someone.” We can discuss this. It’s just I always say the fortune’s in the follow-up. After the email goes out, it’s not you just sitting back and waiting for your money to roll in. No, there’s work to be done. That’s why I always do a follow-up session, a post analysis of my clients. These 10 people clicked on this link, how should you follow up with them? These 10 people clicked on this link … Like for insurance, if you’ve got life insurance versus clinical illness insurance. If the person’s clicked on the clinical illness and you’re going to follow up these calls anyway, say, “Hey, Doug, it’s Dave calling up. We haven’t been talking for a while. This month, I’m focusing on clinical illness.” You can say-

Doug: It’s like, “Wow, how do you know I’m really interested in that?”

Dave: Yeah. You’d probably go, “Hey, I got your newsletter and I checked it out.” Or “Oh, yeah, it’s fantastic,” because I’m going to start with those 20 people that clicked on that link. Then the other people I’m going to call up and say, “Hey, Bob, I’m focusing in on term insurance this month,” or whatever it is or whatever link he clicked on. You can customize your phone calls for that and that’s the same way that automated emails go. Now you’re going to follow up with that person with an automated email focused in on critical illness, the other guy on term insurance. Now you’ve-

Doug: That’s a great plan. With all the people I’ve talked in email, nobody’s talked about getting off of email and talking to people on the phone. I love to get conversations offline, meaning off social media and off email to a personal call whenever I can so having that bit of market intelligence. I think you’re also being respectful of people’s time because you’re not phoning them and pitching them, “Hey is this a good time? Can I pitch you on X?” They’re going, “I’m not interested.” You actually know something that they probably have a need in that space that’s why they’ve looked.

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Dave:  Then another little trick when you’re calling up is when you get your bounces back. You see all the bounces come back and there are nonexistent emails come through there, I’ve one little [inaudible 00:29:14] one, calls up her 20 bounces a month and says, “Hey, Doug, I’m just calling to get your updated email. I noticed that it bounced in our last newsletter. [You’re getting our 00:29:23] newsletter for the last few years.” You say, “Yeah, yeah.” “Here’s my newsletter. I changed from,” whatever, [inaudible 00:29:28], or whatever, and you get the email and hey, [inaudible 00:29:33] for the last six months or whatever, [must be good 00:29:36]. That’s all she says and that’s her followup for the month is to her bounces and she has a closing rate, she gets about 25% of people will put an order in with her. On top of that main thing, she gets 15 out of 20 emails. The other five people she can’t get a hold of. The main thing is she wants to keep those people on her email list and the bulk of this, she’s getting an order from them. Why? Because she picked up the phone and called them.

Doug:  Yeah, absolutely.

Dave:  She didn’t pick up the phone as a sales call. She picked it up as an email call, I need to get your email address updated.

Doug: If there’s any downside to the digital marketing world, I would say I think that’s it is that there’s the belief that we can just push a button and we can send a post. We can write something. We can send an email and then like you said, we can’t just sit back and wait, but people sit back and wait because they believe that’s true or they’re just afraid to have a conversation.

Dave: That’s right. That’s right. That’s why networking groups are still great because you get out and you meet people. You invite them to join your mailing list and then you stay in touch with them. You still have to go face to face. You still have to be able to pick up the phone. You still have to do all these tools that have been there since marketing 101 came along hundreds of years ago.

Doug: Yeah. People still, we do business with people we like and trust, and it’s really tough to like somebody through a digital message or a text message. It’s a lot easier to like them through a Skype call, Zoom call, phone call, face-to-face meeting.

Dave: That’s a bonus. In the meantime, and I used to go to Vancouver Board of Trade. I’d tell people, “Don’t give me your business card unless you want me to stay in touch with you.”

Doug: That’s great.

Dave:  In other words, let’s not sit around a table of eight and trade cards and then go home and go … Because I used to say, “You’re going to forget about the guy beside you just as fast as he’s going to forget about you.” When you’re out there networking and doing it, have a follow-up program. People come to your website, have an enticement so that they can join your email list to stay in touch with you. I get calls from guys I’ve met five, six years ago at Vancouver Board of Trade and I always talk about, “You’re not going to remember me, but I know you ’cause I get your newsletter every month.”

Doug:  That’s awesome.

Dave: I go that’s the proof I want other people to realize. I tell them, “Sign up for my newsletter. You’ll see me coming to your inbox for the next three, four months and then you’ll know what I’m talking about and think about for your business, your clients seeing you come in and your prospects seeing you come in three four months, you’re going to remember them.”

Doug:  Hey, thanks so much for sharing today about a topic that I’m obviously passionate about and so are you, and that’s email and email marketing and serving our customers and using that as a communication vehicle.

Thanks to listeners for tuning into another episode. As usual, I will have the show notes transcribed and I will make sure that all the contact information is there for Dave and his website along with his email address.

‘Til next time, make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes. If you would like to leave us some honest feedback and a rating at iTunes, that’d be great. Coming up, we’re going to start reading out some testimonials from previous clients who have posted on iTunes. Thanks so much and we’ll back to you in a few days.

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HOW TO GET YOUR EMAIL MARKETING STARTED

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Resources

Dave’s email: dave@extracontact.com

WEBSITE: http://extracontact.com

LINKEDIN: ca.linkedin.com/in/extracontact

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/eXtraContact

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/pages/eXtra-Contact/239073039486260

CONSTANT CONTACT Master Certified Solution Provider

(Free Trial): http://extracontact.constantcontact.com

Links to other podcasts and or blog post about email marketing:

• EMAIL LIST RENTAL VS BUYING AN EMAIL LIST
• LEAD GENERATION. EMAIL LIST BUILDING, AND SALES PODCAST

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 HOW TO GET YOUR EMAIL MARKETING STARTED

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