Build Your Credibility and Fill Your Pipeline Using Email with Tom Miller

[00:21] Opening / Introduction [00:41] Tell us about your company. I run a marketing firm called Email for Experts. We help consulting and professional service firms create clients using email marketing. I graduated from the University of Maryland in 2010. I worked in engineering for about six years before moving into marketing. [03:43] Tell us about the distinction of what I'm doing in email marketing versus what you're doing. I still do a good amount of what you're doing, which is the more traditional sense of email marketing. This involves having a list of contacts and publishing a newsletter, or a sales offer that you periodically send out. The other type of email marketing that we're doing is instead of already having permission to email a group of individuals, we are prospecting and emailing people cold. [05:59] How does somebody go about building their credibility using email marketing? A lot of times when people think about using any marketing channel to bring in new prospects, they're thinking about the best pitch to make. The problem is that everybody is pitching. You need to build an email marketing approach that is more inline with how you would meet somebody at a conference. If you behave like a friendly human rather than thinking about how you can blast your message out to thousands of people, you can gain a competitive advantage. [08:59] How does email marketing fill my pipeline? The difficulty with prospecting in general is not only finding a list of people who seem like they are decision makers in your industry, but also making sure they are the most relevant for the service that you provide. One of the best tools that I use is called Prospect.io along with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The nice thing about pretty much any software you're using for marketing these days is there's usually a way to connect it to your CRM. It's pretty straightforward. Regardless of which tool you use, they all have the ability to accelerate the process of finding targeted prospects. [14:20] I know there's people who are listening who are saying they hate getting email marketing. I hate that too. I have the same types of messages in my spam folder. Email is great because it's where most people in the business world spend most of their day. The downside is that so many people know that and sometimes use it for nefarious purposes. The important thing is to reach out in a way that facilitates conversation instead of just a hard pitch. [17:53] Potentially, if you don't start off on the right foot, you can quickly become that guy in the spam folder that we all hate. It's amazing what a little bit of targeting in your approach and a little bit of forethought can do. Focus on the things that your target is typically thinking about. This will make your prospect feel like you already know something about them. [20:29] You've picked a niche. If you were sending an email out to everybody, you'd have to make your message broader, which makes it less valuable. If you can identify something that differentiates you and your business, that's something that translates directly into your marketing approach. [23:27] Talk about the ROI in email marketing. For what we're talking about, the numbers are a little bit different. We're not selling a $100 product, but rather five or six figure contracts. There are a lot of different touch points that go into the process, so it's difficult to pin down the ROI of an email outreach. It's more like a piece of the overall puzzle. [25:52] By building rapport, you're building something that is easy to sell from as opposed to starting the process cold. You're taking that initial window that you have to start a sales conversation and extending it greatly. As long as they are in contact with you, you always have an opportunity to be there when they move forward with a buying decision. [29:08] This way of email marketing is so targeted that I think it's better than traditional email marketing. You can work on building traffic to your website or the size of your email list until the end of time, but you'll never get close to the numbers of some people. What you can do is start this outreach process. You don't need to have a giant list to see results. Links: Tom Miller on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-j-miller/ Email for Experts: https://emailforexperts.com/ Receive Daily Email about Email: https://emailforexperts.com/daily-email/ Prospect: https://prospect.io/ (plug-in for email prospecting) LinkedIn Sales Navigator: https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigator