My Email Marketing Plan. Your Thoughts?

timamr

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Say I have a email list of tens of thousands of small biz/self employed people, mostly mom and pop like mechanics, plumbers, heating and a/c, electricians, etc., and I want to send out 2k emails per week to try and set an appointment with them. Here is my gameplan and what results might I expect?

Send 2k per week from my personal gmail account (no corporate or business email) with a catchy title to peak their interest. Unsure what it will be yet but I am going to put myself in their shoes and ask myself, "would I open that email"

In the body just a few short sentences asking if they are happy with obamacare, have rates recently went up, are they confused? Let me help. And give them an opportunity to log into my google calender and set a time and day to discuss their needs.

My main concern is how many of those 2k emails per week will actually get opened if I come up with a good subject using a personal email account? Any thoughts anyone?
 
I'm sure others will chime in, but 2K a week will flag your gmail account for spam.

I've sent out a bunch of email solicitations using a friend who knows how to do this from a different email address with no results. Maybe a discussion of Obamacrap will yield better response.

Rick
 
Hopefully, you'll pique their interest for peak results.

Thanks moonlight...as always the majority of your posts are just a waste of time with no help. But we understand you are trying to reach the coveted 10k post club so keep wasting peoples time with useless comments...you are almost there! :D

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I'm sure others will chime in, but 2K a week will flag your gmail account for spam.

I've sent out a bunch of email solicitations using a friend who knows how to do this from a different email address with no results. Maybe a discussion of Obamacrap will yield better response.

Rick

Rick,

Thanks, I have thought of that and may just have to pay a little $$ and use a respectable email marketing service. I am sure there are some out there. Monlight, with ur vast knowledge, what do you think?!?!?:laugh:
 
Say I have a email list of tens of thousands of small biz/self employed people, mostly mom and pop like mechanics, plumbers, heating and a/c, electricians, etc., and I want to send out 2k emails per week to try and set an appointment with them. Here is my gameplan and what results might I expect?

Send 2k per week from my personal gmail account (no corporate or business email) with a catchy title to peak their interest. Unsure what it will be yet but I am going to put myself in their shoes and ask myself, "would I open that email"

In the body just a few short sentences asking if they are happy with obamacare, have rates recently went up, are they confused? Let me help. And give them an opportunity to log into my google calender and set a time and day to discuss their needs.

My main concern is how many of those 2k emails per week will actually get opened if I come up with a good subject using a personal email account? Any thoughts anyone?

You will get some opens, a lot is going to depend on where you are getting your lists from. Reading your descriptions I have an idea of how you may be acquiring them.
 
You will get some opens, a lot is going to depend on where you are getting your lists from. Reading your descriptions I have an idea of how you may be acquiring them.

Centralsolution, i already have the list. I will be allowing them the opportunity to open my calender and schedule the appointment time and day that works best for them. Still working out the details of how to get it out but am considering email-list.com to use their email marketing service without using my email.

Do you help people with any of this? You said you had an idea how I was getting the list so if you have other options, I'd be happy to talk to you as well. But like I said...I already have the emails...just wanna know open rates and now I guess....a good company that can get my emails out there!
 
Say I have a email list of tens of thousands of small biz/self employed people, mostly mom and pop like mechanics, plumbers, heating and a/c, electricians, etc., and I want to send out 2k emails per week to try and set an appointment with them. Here is my gameplan and what results might I expect?

Send 2k per week from my personal gmail account (no corporate or business email) with a catchy title to peak their interest. Unsure what it will be yet but I am going to put myself in their shoes and ask myself, "would I open that email"

In the body just a few short sentences asking if they are happy with obamacare, have rates recently went up, are they confused? Let me help. And give them an opportunity to log into my google calender and set a time and day to discuss their needs.

My main concern is how many of those 2k emails per week will actually get opened if I come up with a good subject using a personal email account? Any thoughts anyone?


I'm going to go with tough love on this one.

Yes, I have thoughts, I think it's a complete waste of your time.

1. Using a personal email account you're probably going to get accused of spamming people. In developing a new product we have a notification email we send and it ended up in the spam filter because it had the same subject as a previous email. It's a very legitimate email, but it got flagged by google's algorithm without ANYONE marking it as spam. Once people start hitting the spam button, you're going to start having serious problems.

2. People don't generally respond too mass email if they haven't specifically opted in to it. I have a list of folks that visit my website and specifically opt-in (double opt-in) to have me send them information. I've been adding folks to it for around six months and have had literally one person unsubscribe. It's a much smaller list than anything I could buy, but I get a high open rate and good responsiveness out of it because when people opted-in they knew it was from me. If you have a list of people that didn't specifically say "please email me stuff", you're not going to get much of a response rate. You'd probably have to send at least 10,000 at a time to start getting any traction on it and even that's no guarantee.

3. Nothing you've said here seems to be anything unique or interesting. "Have questions?", "Confused?", "Let me help." Nothing super interesting there. "Over 50% of Americans are eligible for an Obamacare subsidy, do you know how much you qualify for?" That's a much more interesting subject/content that's actionable. Generic "do you have questions" and/or "let me help" in any direct marketing is much more passive than it has to be. I still think the email marketing on a list you've acquired by any way other than folks directly opting-in is a waste of time and resources, but any marketing message should usually be direction actionable. Most people with questions don't know what they don't know.

4. I'd start building a legitimate emailing list. You might be surprised at how many people are willing to give you an email address to send info to, but aren't ready to pull the trigger or set an appointment now. If you stay in front of them you can be their when they're ready and build trust while that's going on.
 
I began mass emailing realtors back in the early 90's, self employed people too. By using a Spyder to crawl web sites I extracted tens of thousands of emails from everywhere. Then with a mass mailing program like Atomic Email I sent thousands a day. I could even include links in the email to tell me who opened them and who didn't, though I often sent the email in txt rather than html for various spam filter reasons. Conservatively I sent around 5k mails a day which compared to a real spammer is nothing and I did write business from it. A couple of week, got a group from a dentist office and a local YMCA, and had a foot in to quote a local fire dept with 125 employees. I even went as far as setting up secondary domains from which to email from and refer respondents to so as not to indudate my primary web site with too much junk mail or be identified as a spam site, which later would happen anyway. Looking back it was a great and cheap way to market and intellectually challenging. But today like everything else, a bunch a dudes have to come along and ruin everything. From mail enhancements to bogus offers for vacations or mortgage refi's. Ask yourself, would you do business with someone you didn't know today? Plus email filtering is far better than it was 10 years or more ago so your lucky if you email ever sees the light of day. Then you have to consider one final fact, there are civil penalties attached and unless you are very clever and hide yourself, it wont take much to identify your legal service address if you know what I mean. And if you must go to such an extent to "hide" your true identity , are you really an ethical and legitimate insurance agent?

I know a lot of time and money is spent today on devloping lists or subscription lists like they are some sort of magical gold. I get about 100 emails a day after 20 years, and have things tightened up pretty good, I still only real the real important 20 a day. And those 100 are legitimate correspondence, the other 500 spams are all "Auto Delete" or better yet sent back to the sender - Bingo. Email marketing on the internet is what Direct Mail is to the mail box. Yeah you get some feedback but are you kidding me, thats the business you want?

I think if I were new and starting out over again today I would look at creating a personality on social media and look for ways to draw attention to myself. I think we are living in a new marketing age, one of attraction rather than promotion. I mention
Social Media because of two very big reasons. I mean if you can land on the top 3 on google like ehealth can than yeah, you'll get a lot of traffic. And if you think about it they rely on the law of attraction as well. You go to them. what they cant do and other big guys cant is put their picture and personality into their social scene. You and I can, and lets be honest, any agent worth his salt should make a good living with a COI of 200-300 or clients right, we don't need to own the world.

I m not saying promotion is dead, and if you undertake a massive spam campaign, chances are you will write some business. But you will have to email thousands a day, not a week, you will need some sophisticated tools and know what your doing. Things have a way of creeping up on you, like your personal ip account will certainly be noticed if your sending out 10 k emails a day all of sudden from your Comcast account. What are you going to have in your email when the open it? A phone number? SO they can call you and tell you what they think of you? Or a link back to your website? Remember what I said earlier, you dot want your primary site to become identified as a spammer too early in the game. And then ask yourself long term, is this really a business model that will thrive over the next 10 years?

I spent a lot of time and years doing this. the thing about technology is it changes rapidly in a fickle market and it gets exhausting trying to keep on top of it. If I wasn't so damn tired of it I really believe the social marketing is the next thing. I know they talk about it all the time on tv, blah blah blah, and thats not exactly what I am talking about. But if you can set your self in as a center of influence, and then draw interest to yourself in a good way , not in a New York Weiner way, that natural traffic will gravitate towards you as you build your self out. I haven't figured out the details of what my approach would be yet, but it definitely looks pretty good. Actually looks like a much better business model than looking at spamming in 1990 because I like the idea of attraction instead of promotion. That is like GOLD, it is why we ask for referrals instead of cold call.

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one final thought, I restarted my emailing just a couple of years ago. having all the tools and knowledge it was nothing to set off a few emails each morning as i got the day started. I dont remember any of them getting a response, at least not enough to keep my interest. I got bored and realized it wasnt worth it anymore. Spend all that time sending out emails and get nothing, at least a decade ago i had have 2 or 3 people a day to talk to.
 
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Most email platforms will not permit you to email recipients unless you have some form of opt-in permission, this includes MailChimp, Constant Contact, iContact, and most others. These platforms are great for opt-in mailings, but they will show you to the door if you do not have opt-in permissions (they find out by surveying your subscribers).

Note that it is not illegal to email someone without permission. But there are Can-Spam considerations, like including opt-out options.

If you are going to bulk mail w/o opt-in, find a platform that specializes in that form of delivery. The key challenge here is maintain inbox deliverability.
 
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