Mike's email marketing magic

Mike Southon First, decide who is your favourite customer, your ‘Customer Mentor’. Someone you like. Someone you’d go and have a coffee with even when there’s no business to talk about. You genuinely enjoy their company.

What industry are they in, and what’s their job title? Let’s say, they happen to be Bob, a Managing Director of a building company.

Next you get a list of 200 similarly sized building companies, ordered in geographical proximity to your own office.

Show this list to your Customer Mentor, and ask them to delete the deceased, the difficult, the nearly destitute or the just plain deranged. Your list could now be down to 100.

You then need their email addresses. This should be provided by your Marketing Department, or outsourced to a Market Research company.

You’re now going to write 100 individually tailored emails, each no more than four lines long. Why so short? Well, each extra line increases the chance of instant deletion by approximately 50%.

The first line is something about their company, along the lines of “I noticed that....” Ideally, it’s a specific gem that you’ve gleaned from your Customer Mentor that leads nicely into your product or service. In the worst case, it’s something you’ve spotted on their web site, perhaps in their Press Release section.

These tend to be less than earth-shattering bits of information, such as they’ve opened up a new office or have a new USB port. This is never going to make the front page of The FT, but to you, utterly fascinating.

Lines two and three are your Elevator Pitch, what you would say to a prospect in an elevator, a maximum of two sentences. First, your Premise, a fancy way of saying what you do. And of course ‘big yourself up’ a bit: “We make excellent widgets”.
This is a bold claim and you’re clearly selling, so before the prospect has time to run away, you need a compelling second sentence. This should be Proof. How can you support that audacious assertion about your widgets?

Your Proof is the name of your Customer Mentor. “Bob at The Building Company loves us and our widgets. Why not ask him?”

If the prospect has heard of Bob or his company, then you’ve won another 15 minutes. This is a realistic objective of a good Elevator Pitch - you’re never going to close a serious sale in a lift with two sentences.

And the objective of the email? To get an appointment of course, so the fourth and final line of this email says “I’m going to be near your office on Tuesday at 10am – would that be a good time to drop in?”

Why not try this instead of putting yourself through the misery of cold-calling? It’s cheap and it works. I can provide references. Honestly!

And if you offer ‘Discipline Services for Naughty Schoolboys’, forget the expensive medieval torture equipment, just get a business directory and tell them to start ‘cold calling’. They’ll soon be begging for mercy...

Find out more about Mike Southon www.beermat.biz.