I have a new client who wants to launch an email marketing campaign. When I asked what business he is in, he said, “We sell telephone equipment and services.”

I offered a gentle correction. “Your business is to help clients operate with greater efficiency and less hassle by deploying smart telecommunications solutions.”

What business are you in? If you say you sell product “x” or service “y,” step back and reassess. Ask yourself, “Why should someone purchase my products or services? How will they benefit?”

The answer to those questions reveals what your business does. You are in business to provide value, to create a benefit. The benefit is what they seek. The product or service is just a means to that end.

Why is this distinction important? Your marketing communications must do more than merely inform prospects and clients about your products and services. You should design communications to interact and collaborate with prospects and client. Content, itself, can deliver a benefit.

My telecommunications client will send emails with tips (best practices for running a teleconference sales call), case studies (how a business like yours used video conferencing to reduce training costs), product comparisons, and other valuable content. He will solicit feedback through interactive surveys.

This will reinforce what the business does. It provides value and benefits. Because they benefit from this content, they’re more likely to see the value in buying the telecommunications products and services.

What benefit do your prospects and clients desire? Answer that question and then create valuable, benefit-driven content. Sales will follow.

(This article first appeared in St. Louis Small Business Monthly which publishes a monthly column, High-Voltage Marketing, by MarketVolt’s Tom Ruwitch.)

Here's what happens when you DON'T separate prospects from suspects!

My 18-year-old cousin received an email from a non-profit last month, promoting the organization’s new planned giving web site and inviting him to register for a free webinar about the topic. After opting-out from the non-profit’s mailing list, my cousin emailed me and asked, “Why would they send me this junk?” My reply, “Because you joined their list, and they probably send everything to everybody every time.”

This non-profit (which shall remain nameless) had a budding relationship with my cousin, who chose to join the email list a few months ago. He appreciated the organization’s mission, and he was probably going to make a donation this month. But he’s not a planned giving prospect. And when this teen received an email about end-of-life planning, he found it creepy, and he didn’t want anything to do with this organization again. “I don’t even have a girlfriend,” he wrote. “Why would I want to talk to these guys about my will?!”

Don’t make the same mistake. Do not send everything to everybody every time. Email marketing is a great tool, in part because it’s relatively inexpensive and easy to use. Press send and – voila – several thousand constituents receive your message. Plus, we all understand that follow-up sells, that it usually takes more than one touch to close the deal with a prospective donor or volunteer. Combine such ease-of-use and affordability with the prerogative to follow-up and you naturally want to press send, over and over and over.

But if recipients do not consider the content pertinent to their interests – or, worse yet, if they find it creepy or counter to their interests – they will press delete, opt-out, click the “this is spam” button, or all of the above. Then, as happened with my cousin, you lose a prospect forever.

So what’s a fundraising professional with a tight marketing budget to do? You have to separate prospects from suspects. You have to segment your lists so that you can deliver targeted follow-ups only to true prospects.

To promote planned giving, the non-profit can include an item about the program among many other items in its email newsletter. The newsletter should include a little bit of everything so that all readers will find something worth reading.

For the planned giving item, include a link to “read more” that points additional information on your web site. Create and send the email with a system that can track who clicks the link. A few days after sending the newsletter, pull the list of people who clicked that link and save that list as “planned giving prospects.” Create a follow-up email about the planned giving web site and webinar and send it only to your planned giving prospects.

You can use the same approach for virtually any business goal you have – raising volunteers, identifying and cultivating major donor prospects, connecting with prospective donors for a specific program.

Use link-tracking in your general interest newsletter to segment your list, and then deliver targeted follow-ups to the prospects you’ve identified. If the non-profit had taken this approach, it would have developed its planned giving program and still had an active relationship with (and a donation from) my cousin.

- Tom Ruwitch

In addition to co-founding MarketVolt, Tom Ruwitch runs MarketVolt, an interactive marketing firm that helps businesses gain and retain followers using email marketing and other technologies. This post originally ran on MarketVolt’s interactive marketing blog. 
 

Our friend Russ Henneberry has a great blog called Tiny Business, Mighty Profits. I was honored to have Russ invite me to be intereviewed on his internet radio show that he includes on the blog.

In the 40-minute discussion, archived on the site, we discussed:

Learn:

• The 3 reasons you shouldn’t be using Outlook, Gmail, etc to run your email campaign
• How and why to track the behavior of your email readers (and how to respond)
• The 3 most effective ways to build your list
• The one instance when it is OK to buy an email list

Russ and I had a great conversation! I want to thank him for inviting me and give him a big shout out for the great work he’s doing with his blog!

I just plowed through my inbox after an afternoon of meetings and came across the monthly email newsletter from Habitat for Humanity St. Louis, one of our long-time clients. I had to put aside what I was doing to write this shout-out for Habitat. Aside from the fact that it’s a great cause, Habitat produces some great emails.

Here’s a link to an online version of the newsletter (MarketVolt automatically generates a version of every mailing you create with the system).

Here are five of the things I like about it:

• Great subject line. “Open Plea for Construction Volunteers! Rain barrel workshop in the ReStore next week!” It’s a bit long. But it includes two topics from the newsletter. Too many organizations use subject lines like “August Newsletter” or “Email Update.” This subject line piques your interest. And it remains readers that the email is full of good content — some not even mentioned in the subject line. So readers wonder, “What else will I find?” as they click to open.
• Attractive, clean design. Habitat has done a great job customizing one of MarketVolt’s built-in, do-it-yourself templates with an outstanding banner image and eye-catching colors. The email is neither too long, nor too busy. Short paragraphs with links to read more.
• Great use of immediacy. Email is great for delivering the last-minute message. And Habitat is a master at doing this. I’ve seen an email from Habitat that says we need volunteers on a building site now. Today’s mailing has several items about events just a few days away. This helps bump up attendance at those events. It also gives the emails a fresh, up-to-the-minute quality. Recipients will open and read these emails because they announce what’s happening now.
• Excellent use of calls-to-action. Every item in this newsletter has a link with an explicit or implicit call-to-action. The “Open Plea for Construction Volunteers” includes a link to “visit our blog for more information.” Habitat can track who clicks that link and identify them as “prospective volunteers.” A follow-up email a day or two before the event may follow. Even if Habitat doesn’t follow-up this way, the organization has some idea of the people who have interest in volunteering. Link-tracking reveals a lot about your recipients — information that you can use to land the prospect. This applies whether you’re a non-profit like Habitat or a for-profit. You can’t track clicks if you don’t include links.
• Prominent Social Media Links. Readers can’t miss the links to Habitat’s pages on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. If you have them on your email list, get them to follow your social media efforts — and vice-versa. Habitat does that well!

Way to go Habitat for Humanity.