Which side of this email marketing debate are you on?

Hello and welcome back to Breakthrough Marketing Secrets!

After the long Thanksgiving weekend, it’s good to be back. Although I’ll admit I’m a bit of a slow-starter today!

There’s something about a nice break that is both relaxing and stressful. Relaxing when you hit day 4 of the 4-day weekend, and finally feel like you can really just have some quiet time uninterrupted by chores or yet another turkey feast. Stressful when your first day back comes, and you realize it’s going to take some real effort to get momentum again.

But you don’t get momentum without movement… So let’s go!

Today’s question is an interesting one.

It points to a kind of debate about email marketing. Maybe not a gloves-off, knock-down, drag-out fight. But rather a debate best represented by marketers’ behavior.

I’ll explain after the question…

 

Good question Brad.

Here’s why I say this is a debate represented by marketer behavior, if not by overt argument…

On one side of the spectrum, you have a business like Amazon. I don’t get a single email from Amazon that’s content. It’s all offers, all the time.

Their behavior suggests that their email marketing strategy is maybe 99% selling, 1% content.

And that’s being generous. It’s probably more like 99.9% to .1%. Or even more drastic.

And does it work? Well, Amazon is the #1 online retailer for quite a few reasons — their email marketing prowess being one of them.

They know me, as a customer. They know how to target their offers based on my past buying and browsing behavior.

Also — and this is MUY IMPORTANTE — they are merely a retailer of products that relies on someone else to sell the benefits and reasons why for the product. They’re primarily a distribution channel with affordable prices. A preferred source based on price, ease of purchase, product availability, and customer relationship.

And by making the offers relevant to me, they know they can get me to buy some of them.

But here’s what’s important. They do not have to position themselves or the products in their emails. They just have to let me know that they have what I want, or might want. And that I can get it from them easily, at a competitive price, and that they have it available for quick delivery. And because of my long customer relationship with them, they know I’m prone to choosing them based on an established trust.

And it works for them. A quick Google search revealed year-old numbers, but they’re close enough for our purposes. An average Amazon shopper will spend around $650 per year on the site. Prime members (like me) will spend a bit more — about $1,340 per year.

Granted, they’re dealing with small margins there. But those are some pretty solid per-customer stats. It’s hard to argue with Amazon’s success in generating revenue as an online retailer. (Profits and revenues NOT being the same thing, if you follow Amazon.)

Contrast that to my typical approach…

This email doesn’t really make an offer. And even if you read to the very end, you won’t find an offer.

I do make offers for working with me on the Work With Roy page on my site. (Oops! Did I just do a very soft sell after telling you I wouldn’t make an offer?)

But in general, a lot of Breakthrough Marketing Secrets emails DO NOT contain any explicit selling.

However, I’m ALWAYS positioning. I’m always “selling” you on my expertise and marketing abilities.

Even when I’m telling a story or making a point that seems completely unrelated to marketing, I have a good reason for it. And it involves making you more predisposed than you were previously to doing business with me in some way.

So in some sense, like Amazon, I’m always selling. However, I do it through content. Which, I guess, puts me at the other end of the spectrum. I’m probably further in the content direction than your 80/20 ratio though, Brad — somewhere between 95/5 and 98/2.

And my results are ALSO hard to argue with. My business is not a publicly-traded corporation, so I don’t have to share financial figures publicly. And really, I’m not comfortable sharing specifics. But I will tell you that the average value of someone on my email list is north of $100.

Of course, my list is a lot smaller — and my total market is a lot smaller — than Amazon’s. But my value generated per subscriber is substantial. And that’s without much in terms of a product catalog, and at far better margins than Amazon.

So, you could say I prefer the “content” approach.

But that really loses the point…

It’s NOT EITHER content OR selling…

It’s both. As I said, all my content is doing a selling job. For one, it’s cutting through the clutter of obvious sales messages, and getting you and a good number of other folks to read these articles (when you may ignore straight sales pitches).

So it’s accomplishing the “attention” goal of a good sales message.

My content has also been the primary tool I’ve used to get readers who not only read articles on my site, but who sign up to get daily articles from me via email.

I’d say that also accomplishes the “interest” goal.

I’ve also managed to use these daily content-focused emails to get a comfortable enough level of coaching clients that I’ve been able to shut down new registrations… Plus I got a nice little group together for my Advanced Direct Response Copywriting Workshop. All with fairly minimal and unintrusive calls to action in my articles and with the occasional dedicated selling email.

Which also means I’m accomplishing the “desire” and “action” goals required to seal the deal.

Contrast this to the content-only approach…

If I just delivered content but wasn’t consciously building my sales case in these emails, you may also consider them to be informative. You may compelled to pay attention to them, and they may even hold your interest.

But if we’re separating content from selling, I wouldn’t care so much about simultaneously setting up the sale. And so I wouldn’t do the little things that might make you start to desire my services or products more. And I wouldn’t work the call to action into the content so smoothly you didn’t realize that 1,000 words was a setup to get you to click and buy (assuming you’re a qualified prospect).

Content without selling might work well for a media organization reliant on advertising revenue. But that’s not what Breakthrough Marketing Secrets is. I’m a publisher of high-end direct marketing information, as well as a direct response consultant and copywriter. And my primary sources of income rely on you choosing specifically to spend your money with me.

When you read an article by Time or Cracked.com or The Wall Street Journal, does it make you want to send them money? Nope. Or, at best, you want to pay a modest subscription fee to keep the content coming. It’s very hard to make $100+ per year, per subscriber with that model.

So if you’re going to content-only, you have to deal in numbers.

I digress…

One final really useful point: what is right for you?

Let me first eliminate the “advertising” model of pure content, where you make money off eyeballs alone. I don’t like that business, I don’t recommend you go into that business. And it’s really not a focus here, so I’ll leave it at that.

Which gives us a new spectrum…

All the way across the spectrum, selling is at 100%. It’s just a matter of how deeply it’s been buried into content.

Amazon at one end, where their selling is not buried in content at all. Breakthrough Marketing Secrets at the other end, where the selling is almost completely buried in content.

What is the right approach for you?

Remember how I said that with Amazon, they’re simply selling someone else’s products — and they don’t have to generate demand? They have a very aware market in terms of the products they sell, and they have to channel that demand toward themselves by making a compelling offer. If that’s your situation, you can use minimal content in your email marketing. As long as your offers are targeted, you can be very successful.

However, if your prospects are far less aware of the products you sell, the value you offer, the problems you solve, and your general selling proposition, you have a harder sales job to do. You have to connect with your reader on many levels, and sell them on many levels.

This is what top copywriters get paid the big bucks for.

And it requires a ton more content and value delivered before you present your offer. This applies in email, space advertising, advertorial, video sales letters, sales pages, direct mail packages, magalogs, the works…

You’re still putting together the content with your sales goal in mind. You just know that if you don’t compel with “content,” your offer will be received with deaf ears.

To answer the question of which end of the spectrum is right for you, you have to figure out how aware the prospect is of the product, solution, problem being solved, and so on. And tailor your approach to take them from their current level of awareness to doing business with you.

You can get a lot more detail on this market awareness approach in the books Great Leads and Breakthrough Advertising. These two books should have a prominent spot on any direct marketer’s bookshelf, and are at the core of my thinking for every new marketing situation.

Yours for bigger breakthroughs,

Roy Furr

Editor, Breakthrough Marketing Secrets