Business Innovators Radio - Ken Countess: How to Crush It With Email Marketing

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Ken Countess is an internationally recognized, accredited expert on Email Marketing. He’s an award‐winning marketer and business coach, and has been Constant Contact’s Top Worldwide Trainer/Partner for many years.Learn more at: KENisEMAIL.comRebelpreneur Radio with Ralph Brogdenhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/rebelpreneur-radio-with-ralph-brogden/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/ken-countess-how-to-crush-it-with-email-marketing

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Here's your host, best-selling author, Marketing and Media Strategist, Ralph Brogden. Hello and welcome to Rebelpreneur Radio. It's the show that helps you build the business you need so you can live the life you want. I am Ralph Brogden. Email marketing. Every once in a while you hear someone say, well, email is dead, or webinars are dead, or chat is dead. Interesting because usually the people who say something is dead, it means they don't know how to use it or they've never learned how to use it.

Because while they're saying it's dead, people are killing it. They're crushing it in that area. So email is one of those things that you think, well, everything is moved to social, but you know what? Every social media company requires an email address before you can sign up for an account. So doesn't it make sense to figure out how you can market to people using email and do it in a way that's obviously ethical and legal, no spam, nothing like that? but there are legitimate ways to prosper and to grow and to make your message stand out using email as a medium. I personally think it's the best platform ever. And my advice to clients is get people off of Facebook, get them off of LinkedIn, get them into your platform,

and begin to communicate, begin to engage with them with email, because if, if, Facebook blocks your account or your LinkedIn gets hacked or somebody buys out the next thing and something happens to your social media presence, then you are compromised and I don't want you to be compromised. So building your email list, that is what we're talking about today with Mr. Ken Countess. He is an expert in this area. He is an internationally recognized, accredited expert on email marketing. He's an award-winning marketer and business coach, and he has been constant contacts top worldwide trainer and partner for many years. Ken, welcome to Rebelpreneur radio. Hey, thank you so much, Ralph. It's so great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Absolutely. Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get into marketing, and then what caused you to fall in love with email and really specialize in that? Oh, fantastic question. Well, I started out as a corporate drone, actually. Actually, before that, I was in radio. I was in radio for about six years. And when I got out of college, I got a marketing degree because I wasn't quite sure really what I wanted to do, the first college I went to. Everybody was a pre-med student. I couldn't stand the side of blood. So I thought, that's probably not the good field for me. But I always loved this. And I started working, believe it or not, at a 7-Eleven when I was 15 years old, and I just found business to be kind of cool. So I wound up getting a marketing degree from, say, University of New York, and went to work from Motorola in 1979. I spent over 20 years there as a marketing guy and made my way up the ranks.

And in 2001, I left there as the company was restructuring. and wound up at a company that actually now is part of CVS, the drugstore chain. It was Caremark, which was their pharmacy benefit company, went to work from there to Marriott, and then to a company now owned by Honeywell. And after all that time, Ralph, I decided, you know what, I really don't like being a corporate drone. I'd rather be out on my own teaching businesses how to be more successful. And in 2011, I got recruited by Constant Contact. They knew that I had been a broadcaster and a professional presenter.

And I wound up being part of a group of 300 people that they had go around the country, teaching small businesses, how to do digital marketing, which at that time was pretty well limited to email. And here's the thing about email. As you so eloquently said, email's been around. while, a lot of people think, God, it must be dying. Email is the granddaddy of social media. Right? It's, email's been around since long before they called it digital marketing or social media. But the thing about email is that everybody checks their inbox every day. So you're right on the

money when you say all social platforms require you give them an email address. Guess what they do with it? they sent you an email. But the great thing about email, there are many things that are great about it. When you're using email marketing, you own your list. When you're posting on social media, you have no idea who's actually seeing your stuff. You may get to know the number of views, but you can't really track who's engaging with your content. And you're right. If Facebook were to sell your contact info to somebody else, you're stuck.

Whereas if you have an email marketing account, you own your list, you control your destiny. And one other thing, email marketing, you know, they measure the results, the ROI of all social, all digital marketing platforms. And did you know email marketing's ROI is 36 to 1? on average, which means that for every dollar you spend on an email campaign, you should expect at least $36 back for every dollar you spend. And that's more than triple the ROI of social media. So I don't know about you. I'll take 36 to 1 over 2 to 1 every day of the week.

So will I. I mean, that blows away every advertising metric and everything I've ever seen, 36. to one. And, you know, the thing that hurt my feelings on social media is when I realized that when I post a message on Facebook and I think I have, I don't know, 3,000, 3,500 Facebook friends, that's not equal to sending out 3,000 emails to people on my list. What I found out is maybe if I'm lucky, 100 out of those 3,000 people may see my post, and Facebook represses or suppresses all the others waiting for their engagement algorithm or whatever it is. But I think a lot of people have the impression, well, you know, I'm posting things on social

media every day and I'm not getting the response that I expect. And I've got 3,000, 4,000 or even more friends on Facebook. The fact is, all of those friends aren't seeing your message. At least with email, if you send out to a list of 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000, you know those messages are going out. Much better chance of being seen. And if your message isn't being seen, it can't be opened. And if it's not open, people can't act on it. So that maybe explains why it's 36 to 1 return on investment as opposed to social or advertising.

Yeah, that's totally right. And in fact, when you said you have a list of about 3,000 or 3,000 friends, and maybe 100 will see it, the actual algorithm, Facebook's algorithm, this is their data. 2% of people, if you post a text message on Facebook, 2% of your friends will see it. So out of your 3,000, take 2%, that's how many may see it. Whereas with an email marketing platform, no matter which one you're using, And with constant contact, the delivery rates 97%. So if you've got 5,000 people on your list, 97% of them, you're assured your email will show up in their inbox.

Amazing. Now, one of the things that I teach people is how to make sure you show up in the inbox and not the promotion or social folder. But for sure, it'll arrive. And that's not true with social. You know, email, as I said, it's the granddaddy of social media. You're not chasing after the next bright, shiny new thing, right? When social started, it was Facebook and LinkedIn, and then along came Instagram and WhatsApp.

And, you know, the latest big name is TikTok. Well, you know, they all have a certain life cycle, but email's been around for over 30 years. So if I'm listening to this, I'm a small business, and I'm already persuaded. that, yeah, I should go with something that's going to give me more ROI. How do I get started with emails? I'm starting from scratch. I don't have, let's say I don't have a list or the list I have is very small. What are some things people can begin to do to start in this email marketing thing?

I guess the first step is to build a list and then how do you build that? Sure. You know, the thing about a list is it's not so much. quantity, it's quality. So you start with the people who know you. I've got a client who started with a list of eight people. Eight. They're people who know her. So they already know her. They like her. They trust her. So when an email from her shows up, her name's Judith, by the way. When an email shows up in their inbox from Judith, they know who she is. So they're likely to open it. The thing about email is it's really about building relationships.

So if you have a relationship with someone, let's say you've been exchanging emails with them, personal emails, on Gmail or Yahoo Mail or maybe you're even an AOL email person. That's where you start. And then in terms of building your list, maybe you go to a Chamber of Commerce event. I'm a BNI member. Maybe you go to a BNI event. or maybe you're posting on social, you could just as easily post a link on social or just say to someone in your post, send me a direct message or private message, give me your email address and I'll

add you to my list. Once again, the thing about email is it's about building relationships. You don't want to use email to sell, sell, sell, because nobody opens up their inbox in the morning to buy, buy, buy. Right? They want to learn something. They want to be educated, informed, entertained. So if you're always there trying to sell something, then you'll find your results won't be as good as what we've been talking about, that 36 to 1RLI. I have a client who was using Google AdWords, and by its nature, AdWords is to sell, right? So she was running her business. She was generating. about $50,000 a year in revenue. Four years in a row, flat at 50 grand, she was only using Google AdWords.

I said, what was that like? And she said, well, it's kind of like flushing money down the toilet. So she came to one of my workshops. And at the end of the workshop, she came up to me and she said, you know, I like what she had to say, get me started with email marketing. So the next month, She stopped using AdWords, started using email, started at $10 a month, right? So it's pretty cheap to start. She went from not $50,000 a year, but within six months, she generated an additional quarter million dollars in sales. And by the end of one year, she had $750,000 in sales.

just by virtue of using email to educate her existing list on the products that she sells. And interestingly, Ralph, she's in the funeral business, meaning she sells promotional products to funeral homes. And she sells three quarters of a million dollars worth of products to them. And I would say to her, Patty, what do you sell to a funeral home that she generated that kind of revenue? And it was actually crematory bags, right? I mean, it's the old joke of people are dying to get in, right? So funeral homes have a steady state of business, and the crematory bag is a consumable product they need to keep buying. Wow.

And so that's what she would do is promote the kinds of products that a funeral home would have in demand and generated that size of business only using email. Interesting, interesting. Well, hey, if it can work, if email can work in a funeral home service business, then I'm sure it can work for most of the people listening to us right now who are selling coaching services or business consulting services or some kind of helping profession. It sounds like what you're saying, Ken, is it's about building relationships. and that email is, of all the choices of mediums, media that we have available, email is the best medium for doing that because of the reasons that you said. Everyone wakes up in the morning. One of the first things they do is they check their email. So that's an opportunity to build the relationship, to help people to know, like and trust you on a different level.

or starting out that way and then deepen that relationship as time goes on. That's true. And building that relationship takes time. I liken it to dating. When you meet somebody for the first time, you don't say, hey, nice to meet you, will you marry me? Yeah. No, of course not. Right?

You date. It's a dating process. So over time, people get to know, like, and trust you digitally. I have some clients that they start to work with me within a month's time. I have one client who took him 10 years of receiving my emails to finally get to the point where he said, you know, I've been trying to do this on my own and I just can't seem to get it right. Can I hire you to help me get it right?

And so for him, it took a long time, but he's a wonderful client who recognized the value because he experienced it himself. We built a relationship over a period of time. And he said, you know what? I see how that works. Help me apply it to my business. Wonderful. So it's, what are some best practices around email marketing?

Maybe a couple of those because a lot of questions that come up in people's minds are, well, how often should I email? Or, you know, if I, people don't want to hear from me more than once a week or three times a week. They get lost in the scheduling aspect of it. Is there a right way? Or how do you respond to people who are wondering how often they should send out emails? Yeah, no, great question.

I get asked that all the time. The answer to the how often is it depends on your business, typically, especially when you're first starting out, One a month is fine as you build that relationship with people once a week, if you're able to come up with some good content that's engaging, once a week works just fine. But the real trick to it is to keep it short and sweet because nobody spends a lot of time reading emails. If you spend hours creating a long email that someone's going to spend 15 seconds to 30 seconds reading, then you've wasted your time and theirs. The beauty of having it short and sweet is you give them the information they need,

and it actually gives you permission to wind up in their inbox the next time because they know you're not going to waste their time. So if you keep it relevant, short and sweet, you'll hit a home run every time. Okay. And then the entrepreneur is going to say, all right, well, how do I make money by sending out informational educational, educational emails, how often should I pitch them? I mean, I can hear this conversation going on in people's minds.

Are you going to mix and match the kinds of emails you send out? Or would you recommend that they send out the content that's educational and helpful, but include a call to action for more? Or does it depend on the situation? Yeah, you always want to include a call to action. So in the emails I send out, for instance, every week down at the bottom, it's click here to schedule a call. And that's the extent of my pitch. But in terms of if you want to, if your mindset is to pitch more often, right, you want to sell, sell, sell, which is not what people want to see, generally you follow like with most things in life. It's the 80-20 rule. 80% of the time, you're educational. That gives you. your permission 20% of the time to be promotional. So you could think about it this way. If you were sending out an email every single week, then make four of the five in the month educational and

make the fifth one promotional. But not overtly. Don't be shouting from the mountaintop, buy from me. Just make it more of a soft sell. And you're much more likely to get people, number one, engaging with you and number two, not unsubscribing. Yeah. So it sounds like if you're giving them the good content and building the relationship, I like your approach just to have the simple call to action down there at the bottom. Click here to need help with your email marketing. Click here to schedule a call. Something to that effect that is helping or making an offer of help, but it's not using a lot of salesmanship. Yeah, it's not in your face. It's much more of a soft sell.

And if they're accustomed to seeing that button lined up at the bottom of your email every time they receive it, at some point, they will get to the point where they say, you know what, maybe I should give him a call. Yeah, why not? I mean, it's a free consultation or whatever most of the time. I'd like the story you told a little bit ago, Ken, about the guy on your email list who read your emails for 10 years before he finally picked up the phone and scheduled a consultation. You just never know who's reading, who's following. And I've been amazed myself to send out emails and then have people turn into clients that I haven't heard from in years. And then all of a sudden, here they are. They're ready.

And so I think people give up too easily. And then they overdo it when they do get into it. So what we want to do is very measured, just be consistent. Have the call to action, but don't oversell. And what's another tip? A lot of people worry about spam complaints and about unsubscribes. What is your advice to people who are kind of afraid of that aspect of it? Yeah, as long as you're providing valuable content, you're not going to be, number one, considered a spammer.

And the companies who are delivering your email aren't going to have you want to. up in the spam box. So just stay on the side of being educational. And the reality is at some point someone may say, you know what, I don't want to receive these emails anymore and they may unsubscribe. That's actually okay. It's actually helping you clean up your list so that those who are left are the people who want your content. So there's really nothing wrong with people unsubs. You just don't want them unsubscribing in droves. If they are unsubscribing in droves, that's a clue to you that maybe you're overdoing something. Yeah, yeah.

And then every once in a while, somebody says, well, I have a list, but it's a few years old and I haven't done much with it. At that point where you were talking about quality of the list versus the quantity, so you could have 5,000 emails, but if you haven't sent anything, how long is too long? Would you try to reengage them with a short thing? Or what about that situation? Yeah, for someone who's got a list, I mean, maybe pretty old. I mean, maybe you were in business five years ago and then went to work for somebody else.

And then threw in the towel and said, hey, I'm going to go back into business for myself again. And you pick up on that list that you had sitting in the archive somewhere. There are a couple of ways to go about getting started. Number one is you can upload the list and do a test send. And the systems today, the artificial intelligence built into most of these email marketing systems will tell you whether the emails were valid or not. Email addresses were still alive or not. The other way to do it, and this is something I recommend to my clients is I send them to a company that will actually do a test of the entire list and validate whether the email addresses are good or not. And they charge a small fee.

I had one client that had a list of 17,000 people that was a pretty old list, five years or more old. So I sent them to that company. They ran the list through. And it turned out that 15,000 of the 17,000 were actually still good. And so for a very nominal fee, I think it costs them about $100. And I don't take any fee. I just, if I send them off to somebody else, you know, that's between them. But for a very minimal investment, $100, they were able to confirm that $15,000 of those 17,000 were good.

And that's what they used to start emailing again. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's amazing. That's a pretty good percentage to still have. I was surprised how good it was. Yeah, I was expecting half or three quarters. Yeah. So your website is can is email.com.

We'll have that website on the rebelpreneur website as well. So for people who are listening and they're kind of like the guy who says, I've been trying to do this myself and it's not working. Ten years I've been listening to you. Now I'm going to reach out and get some help. Hopefully people won't take 10 years and waste 10 years trying to figure this out. So how can they reach out to you if they want to have your expertise in getting their email marketing dialed in? And how do you work with people?

What do you do with them and for them? Sure. Well, the easiest way to reach for me, as you mentioned, my website is can is email.com. And right there on the homepage down near the bottom, there's a red button. you click the red button and it schedules a call with me. And so free consultation, there's no sales pitch. I listen and hear a little bit about your business. And we talk about ways that you might be able to use email marketing.

And if you decide to move forward, awesome. I have three packages. They're also found on the website. The direct way to the packages is can is email.com slash packages. But the tab is right at the top of the page on the website. And there are three packages I offer. There are a one-month starter package, two months and three months. And we work together to help you get things off the ground and help you make more money.

Wonderful. Wonderful. So, again, the website is Ken is email.com. Ken, this is good. I mean, just in our short conversation, I've got all kinds of ideas running through my head about what I should be doing with my email marketing. And so this has been really fun. Any, well, before I let you go, are you working on anything in particular that you're excited about that you'd like to share with our listeners? Yeah, one of the things that I'm working on that I really enjoy doing is, you know, the AI is the buzzword these days, right?

Artificial intelligence. And so what I'm working with people on now and what they're having a lot of fun with, too, is implementing AI in their email marketing. And it's super simple to do. When I work with people, you mentioned my relationship with constant contact. I've been their top trainer for quite a long time. And so I offer a free 60-day trial of constant contact. And the way you get to it is the best email offer.com. The best email offer.com.

There's no credit card needed. It gives you a 60-day free trial. And when you use that link, you get access to the AI that's built into constant contact. They actually use chat GPT as the engine for their AI. And I teach people how to get started using it. And we all have a lot of fun because it's amazing what it'll come up with, especially for people who have writers block. And that's typically it, right?

I have no idea what to write, they say. I say, okay, here, let's go in. Let's play around with this tool. And they're blown away. The ahas and the laughter and they wind up being able to send an email that works within seconds. Wow. Powerful tool. So that's the best email offer.com to get access to that.

Wonderful. That's right. And when someone uses that link, they immediately join my inner circle, which is a free membership where we do a free group. call every month. And we talk about how to make your email campaigns better. Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, this has really been educational and I hope encouraging for everyone who's listening

and you're getting tired of posting on social media all the time and not getting the result that you want. All that time and effort, if you invested in email marketing, as Ken has said, you could get 36 to 1 return on investment in time and money and energy. And that's on average. So I'm going to do much better. So check that out. And check out Ken's website. Ken is email.com and also the best email offer.com. Ken, any final words of wisdom or last bit of advice you would like to leave with our listeners? Yeah. The word of advice is just to do it. So many people say, I'm not ready. I don't. know what to do. I say, look, it's like learning to drive a car. Until you get behind the wheel, you know, you need to practice and you're not going to be perfect the first time out.

And that's okay. Just get started. And then contact me and I'll help you get better. Wonderful. Wonderful. Ken Countess, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and expertise with us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Ralph. Great to be here. You've been listening to Rebelpreneur Radio with Ralph Brogden. Download the show notes and much more at Rebelpreneur.com.