As a small business owner selling professional services as a consultant, professional, or coach, you’re no doubt aware of the power of email marketing. It remains the single best effective way to communicate one-on-one with your prospects and customers.
And, despite all the inroads social media marketing has made, your primary objective with all other forms of marketing should be to get people to sign up for your list. And I’ll be writing future posts about how to do that.
But let’s say you’ve signed up for an autoresponder, and you’ve got mechanisms out there that are drawing people in and signing up for your list.
Okay, great. Now what? How do you most effectively communicate with them? How do you write those messages?
That’s where these three key questions come in:
#1: WHO?
Who do you want to speak to? This is all about knowing your audience and what you’re offering.
Who is your ideal customer? Not generally, but specifically.
Male? Female? Consultant? Coach? Other professional?
What do they do for a living? Where do they work – at home? Or in an office?
What age group are they? Are they single? Married? Have kids? Do they live in the burbs? The Big City? Or in a cabin in the woods?
Are they on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or what? What publications do they read? Who are their favorite authors? What podcasts do they listen to? What’s on their mind a lot of the time? What are their dreams? What do they aspire to?
Ideally, you literally want to be able to write to ONE person. You’ve heard the term “avatar”, right? (Not just the movie version).
You want to be able to describe your ideal customer so well that you can create a picture of that person, find a picture of them online somewhere, print it out, and then post it somewhere in your office so you can see them when you’re writing your emails.
Yeah … that kind of specificity.
#2: WHAT?
What – exactly – do you want to say to them?
What are you offering to them? And what do you want them to do?
This – again – comes from knowing your avatar really well, knowing what their big challenge is, and then matching your solution and message to their problem.
What is the big challenge you can solve for them? Do you have a system that can save them time? Bring them more prospects? Or maybe offloads “stuff” that frees their time to focus on what they do best?
Keep it simple. With the short attention spans in our hyper-info society, you’ve got to stay on point. Have one focus for each email you send out.
#3: HOW?
How do you want to say it to them?
This is where knowing how they feel about the problem is critical. People don’t make decisions based on logic, they make them based on how they feel.
You need to tap into that feeling so they know you “get” them.
So what’s the best way to do that?
Is it in a metaphor? A customer success story? Or maybe your own story about how you overcame a challenge by coming up with the solution that you did? There are many tactics for doing this. You just need to find the one that best matches your service with your audience.
How do they feel about it? What words would they use to describe it?
Those are the three questions you must consider when doing email marketing – Who, What and How.
