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Email Marketing Kung Fu
Have you ever heard email described as, "the killer Internet Application?" Do you understand why email is the killer app for your business on the Internet, or how to make it that way if it isn't now?
In my spare time, I teach WingTsun(TM) Kung Fu. I learned Internet marketing by marketing my martial arts schools and classes online. Much of what I've learned about Internet marketing - and Life - has been strongly influenced by Kung Fu.
Good Kung Fu is concept-driven. Good Internet marketing should be, too. Have you ever heard the concept, "The best defense is a good offense?"
My students and I are nice people. But if you've ever had to defend yourself or your family, you know you can't be too nice. Your survival, or the survival of your loved ones, depends on you winning. You cannot stop, you must win.
So let me ask you: If you were in a situation where you had to defend yourself and your family - life or death! - would you only hit once? Of course not. You'd keep hitting until you and your family were safe, wouldn't you?
But is that how you market your business on the Internet? Are you relentless? Do you win? Or do you just get one hit per visitor? Do you really think people are going to wait around to see what happens? Or come back later for another hit?
It sounds funny, but this is what the vast majority of businesses do on the Internet! I've done it too, and I KNOW better! Any marketer will tell you it's a known fact that it normally takes multiple exposures to your marketing before someone actually makes a purchase. It's so easy to focus on getting a hit on your web site. But what's the chance you're going to win with just one hit?
Do you know what it costs you to get a visitor to your web site? Maybe you can measure it because you're doing pay-per-click, popup, or banner advertising. Or maybe you just know you spent umpteen hours hunched over your keyboard sweating blood trying to optimize your pages for the search engines. Any way you count it, I'm betting it's costing you a lot of time or money for each visitor. Do you really want them to just surf in and surf out, never to be seen again, and never to generate any revenue?
Are you going to crawl back in every Monday morning to a job you hate? Your family would be a lot safer if they didn't have to depend on the good will of an anonymous corporation, wouldn't they?
Are you going to win?
Are you an Internet Warrior?
Then you have to get their email address, and permission to email them. Then we start our Kung Fu.
I'm going to teach you the concept of the WingTsun chain punch. The chain punch is like a machine gun - it's a continuous chain of punches, each one linking to the next in a continuous unbroken chain. They just keep coming! Believe it or not, with a little practice anyone can punch 7 or 8 times a second for 100 punches or more. In fact, 10 punches per second is not that difficult and 12 punches per second is not unheard of! And every one of those punches is automatic, it's reflex. It's all on autopilot.
That's what your email newsletter can do for you. It's your kung fu chain punches. They just keep coming until you win!
Now I want to be sure to specify here that we're not talking spam - we're talking permission marketing. We're talking about emailing to people who've subscribed to your newsletter from your web site.
Good self-defense is simple. There's no time to try to do complex, memorized sequences of dozens of movements! You just need a couple simple things that really work when the chips are down and that are pretty hard to screw up.
In the WingTsun Kung Fu that I teach, chain punching fills the bill. You learn it pretty much day one, then you do about a thousand a day for the next 40 or 60 years! Of course it will work, you know it as well as you know how to walk!
We're going to do the same thing with email. Here are the concepts and simple steps of Kung Fu Email Marketing:
1. The primary job of your web site is to get a visitor to give you their email address and permission to email them. You need to prominently feature your subscription mechanism. The mechanism can be as simple as an email link, a form they can submit, a popup/popunder/popover, or whatever. Just get the email address. And be sure to tell them what you will do with it - you will send them your newsletter, ezine, occasional special offers, or whatever. It doesn't hurt to tell them in plain English that you're not going to sell their email address to a bunch of spammers either. And be sure to keep that promise! Since people are getting pretty protective of their email addresses, it may also be a great idea to give them a good reason to subscribe. Maybe you can give them a free ebook or report, or a free trial of your service.
2. You want your email newsletter to earn your subscribers' trust and respect, turn subscribers into customers, and customers into repeat business. You need to send your newsletter regularly forever, earning trust and respect the old-fashioned way, and never letting your subscribers down. You can do this manually, but I recommend instead doing at least most of it with a sequential autoresponder. There are a number of good ones out there, and you can either go with one hosted on someone else's servers or you can run a script on yours.
That's it, you've now taken your first lesson in Kung Fu Email Marketing! What, did you think it would be hard or something? C'mon, this is just Internet marketing, not Kung Fu fighting!
About the Author
Mike Adams has been doing WingTsun Kung Fu since 1980. You can learn more about his WingTsun Kung Fu schools at: http://www.dynamicwingtsun.com/
For more of Mike's Internet marketing tips, tools, news, articles, and resources, visit: http://www.timberway.com/