Why I’m Sticking With Email Marketing As My #1 Marketing Media For The Next 5 Years

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Igor: Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your
host Igor Kheifets. A lot of people talk to me about why I insist on using email
as my primary weapon of marketing influence today even though there is so many
different medias that are literally popping up every where. I mean we are talking
all the social media involved, there is push notifications, there is SMS
marketing, there’s all this stuff and yet throughout the years I’ve never moved
away from using email as my primary weapon of influence on the internet. The
reason is really, really simple. If anything I believe email only got stronger.
Yes, yes I know that the email open rates have gone down across the board and I
know that the email click through rates have gone down across the board and that
today it’s absolutely normal to be emailing a thousand people only have about 80
of them open the email and only have about 8 clicking the link. I know that and
it’s perfectly fine with me. You see the consumer as we know him or her has
changed compared to the kind of customer we used to work with about 5 to 10 years
ago. Today the consumer does not want to talk to anybody. The consumer just wants
to get online and do their own research and then make a decision to buy from a
reputable source of merchandise or information.

Now, what this means is that the consumer doesn’t want to pick up the phone
anymore, the consumer doesn’t want to chat with you, the consumer doesn’t want to
“waste time” on being sold and of course let’s not forget the amount of
skepticism, I mean the skepticism levels that the consumer is walking around with
right now are ridiculous because you can’t really talk to anybody without them
being afraid of you selling you something. In fact, I think last year or a couple
of years back, I saw this video where a homeless person was offering money to
people who needed it where he would approach people standing next to a traffic
meter or a parking meter and who were looking for change and he would offer them
change to pay for their parking and they would literally not take the change. Many
would get suspicious and one guy even told him to f*** himself which was really
fascinating to see when a person who is in need is offering you something when you
don’t really need it, all of a sudden we turn upside down and inside out and we
get really hostile and aggressive with that person. But this just to illustrate
that people are super skeptical and they do not want to talk to you on the phone
via chat or in any other form in order to make a buying decision because they are
afraid of being sold and pressured into purchase.

Now with that in mind this is why I believe email will only get stronger as we go
along on the internet regardless of how much media will keep popping up. You see
the only media that allows us to have a conversation, a dialogue with our customer
without our customer really noticing this dialogue is email. The only media that
allows us to position ourselves properly in front of the customer as a trust
authority is email. By far the only media that drives people to purchase things
online is still email and it is leading by a large gap by the way. It is not a
neck in neck you know sort of race against Facebook, no. Email is 60% more likely
to bring someone towards a point of purchase than any social media outlet out
there.

Now back to what I just said about conversation, what is that conversation? You
see when we communicate with our potential customers through email, and if we do
it right, it feels like a one on one chat like a conversation you have with friend
over a coffee. Now not surprisingly Google has been encouraging people who are
building websites, building content rich websites to build their sites with the
same goal in mind. They are now encouraging people to write content and produce
content and give advice in the same way that you would give it to your best friend
that’s what’s considered to be “good SEO”. Now what this creates though is the
feeling of trust and empathy between you and your customer which ultimately leads
to the sale and the fact that you’re using email as your primary media will only
allow you to be perceived as a trusted authority by your customer because the
companies that have email lists and are doing a good job of emailing you are
usually trusted that’s what we learned to believe in the last 5 to 10 years or so
with the incredible rise of email marketing and in general internet marketing on
our planet. Because in the last 5 years, we have seen an incredible rise of the
e-commerce industry, we have seen explosions in the business opportunities space,
the MLM space has been finally moving in on the internet even though a lot of
people are still doing cold calls and hotel meetings which is surprising to me but
email is going to be the media because people are still conditioned to buy through
email, they are conditioned to take advice from email and email when it comes to
just sheer numbers almost everybody has an email address but only I think 20 or
25% of the amount of people that have an email address have a Facebook account so
just something for you to keep in mind next time as you’re choosing your primary
media. Now, you maybe wondering, “Okay Igor are you saying that I should not be on
social media at all? Should I forget about my Instagram account? Should I forget
about my SnapChat account? Should I completely drop my Facebook status updates?
Well in my humbly accurate opinion, yeah, you don’t really need it, I think it’s a
waste of time but if you insist on using social media in your marketing arsenal
the first thing you have to remember is that this is not about branding. Nothing
that you do on social media brands you as anything. Most people think or at least
most people I spoke to recently they believe that posting motivational quotes on
Facebook and Instagram brands you as an expert, brands you as a motivational
speaker or whatever. That is not true because everyone and their brother are
posting motivational posters on their Facebook wall. In fact, nobody offers any
unique opinion on anything on Facebook these days. They just repost each other’s
quotes.

Now the other element of social media is that it could be used as a supporting
mechanism for your overall marketing strategy where it’s not a media where you can
engage your audience but the problem with social media is that you’re not going to
be engaging anywhere close the amount of people you think you will be. Let’s just
take Facebook for instance; the problem with Facebook is that you get only to
reach about 6% of your friends and audiences. So if you got a Facebook fan page
with 1000 likes, any post that you publish will be only seen by like maybe less
than 50 people or so and that’s on a good day. If you got 1000 friends then on
average only about 5 people will see your post. Now you got 500,000 fans or more
that number is further decreased down to 2%. Now you would be asking yourself why?
Why would Facebook do something like that? Well the answer is simple; Facebook is
there to make money. That’s the number one purpose that Facebook is driven by just
like any corporate giant and if their number one purpose is to make money and
their number one income stream is advertising then they will do anything in order
to minimize organic reach and maximize your necessity to buy ads. In fact, we can
also see the same trend when it actually come to running ads on Facebook which we
have been doing lately because I just wanted to prove to people that I don’t just
yell about things not working but I can actually prove it now. So with Facebook
what’s funny is that you can have a good ad running and all of sudden you wake up
the next day and they double the cost per click and the cost that it takes you to
reach somebody within your audience without any changes whatsoever. Now these
changes actually have nothing to do with you. So you didn’t change anything about
your landing page, you didn’t change anything about your ads and you didn’t change
anything about the demographics of the people you’re trying to reach but what
Facebook didn’t tell you is that they will increase their prices unexpectedly
without announcing it if it’s seasonal. So for instance, if you’re running your
ads and you’re just about to hit Easter or Passover, if you’re Jewish, guess
what’s going to happen, because the e-commerce traffic goes up during those
times where people go online to buy gifts and stuff like that Facebook will
automatically increase everybody’s cost per click and cost per impression because
they know that everybody will advertising and they’ll make a ton of money. Just
like any other corporate giant that will increase their prices during busy season
like say the hotel business or airline companies who will intentionally double the
plane ticket prices just because they know that people have to get places, they
have to travel and they have no choice and they all have this agreement between
them, “Okay let’s double the prices tonight and we will all make a lot of money
during the holidays.”

So next time you are considering whether or not to invest two hours per day
growing your organic Facebook following, posting on your Twitter account or do
something useful that will actually grow your email list so you can mail that list
and make some money, now you know where you need to put your time and effort
and money in order to make the most ROI with your investments. So this is Igor, thank
you for tuning in for another edition of List Building Lifestyle and until next
time we chat, have a good one.

Thanks for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to subscribe on iTunes
or Google. Play to never miss an episode because who knows just one conversion tactic
we share on the show might double your list and double your business. Download the
transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and
don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival
Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival . This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

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