Interview with Winton Churchill: Email Marketing for Complex Sales Cycles

I recently interviewed the author of Email Marketing for Complex Sales Cycles. We discussed email, spam and how to succeed at email marketing.

Marketing Eggspert: Why do you think some people send spam emails, ruining it for everyone else?

Winton Churchill: The vast majority of all spammers do it for financial reasons.  Unfortunately they’re able to convince people from companies who are not completely clued in to or subject to the various anti-Spam laws.  Furthermore most of these operators are able to cloak themselves and hide their identities from enforcement organizations.  Many spammers operate in or through countries where it is not a crime to send unsolicited e-mail in the volumes they send them.

There are some initiatives both in the United States and worldwide that should over time substantially reduce the volume of spam we all get.  Unfortunately, until a combination of new legislation and new technology fall into place and we’re all going to have to wrestle with the spam monster. It won’t change quickly…but is improving.

Fortunately many good solutions exist for filtering, rejecting, and otherwise dealing with spam.  I know in my own Outlook inbox I’ve managed to pull my spam documents down from about a hundred a day to about four.  Yes it’s aggravating, but I get so much benefit from the efficiency of e-mail communication that I’m willing to tolerate it at that level.  And it should only get better from here.

Marketing Eggspert: Can you summarize for our audience the special needs of complex sales cycles and why they’re important?

Winton Churchill: Well essentially my definition is a complex sale is one that occurs over time and requires that you form a relationship with your prospect or educate them to a certain level about an issue before they buy. Many years ago it made sense to send salespeople out into the field and have them knock on the doors of their complex sale prospects. Today that’s too expensive.  The biggest challenge that we face today with a complex sales cycle is getting the attention of our best prospects and then developing a relationship with them that builds the trust and respect required to close a complex sale. The special needs boil down to the ability to communicate en masse to your target audience in a way that they embrace and enjoy.  If you can’t do that, your sales process will become less and less effective.

Marketing Eggspert: Is email marketing changing with the ever evolving nature of internet marketing? How so?

Winton Churchill: When you have permission and communicate effectively, email is extremely powerful and reliable.  Getting that email address means you have a level of trust.

Not a week goes by that some email firm doesn’t offer a new tool, gadget or statistics capability.  I find that it takes a while to sort through these “improvements” to understand which ones can work to your advantage.  Many of these new improvements require an unacceptable level of “bloat” meaning that they can make your message difficult to display in the recipients inbox…so before you use a new tool or capability you must check for unanticipated consequences.

Marketing Eggspert: What are the top 3 mistakes people make with email marketing?

Winton Churchill: Mistake #1–Not targeting your message to your audience — we are all happy to read advertisements and promotional messages related to our fields of interest…the less related, the lower our interest level.  The most common mistake I see with companies today is sending messages to people because they can.  They don’t care if the message is relevant or welcome.  This is the old-style push selling and always unwelcome.

Mistake #2–Thinking that writing an e-mail designed to elicit a response and eventually a sale, is like writing an e-mail about a company vacation policy.  It’s not.  Writing copy is both a science and an art.  There is a very significant amount of science and if you don’t understand that you probably are going to waste all the money you spend on your list or irritate your prospects so severely that they ask you to stop sending them information.

Mistake #3 — Not thinking about the specific small step you want your prospect to take when they finish reading your e-mail. If you sell a $10,000 product  (or even a $20 product or service) it is very unlikely that your prospect will buy right away on the strength of a single in e-mail.  But they could begin an investigation process that could lead them to that conclusion.  Your job with each e-mail is to get them one notch closer to that decision to buy.

Too many e-mail solicitations today end with “…and visit our website for more information.”  The research is very clear on this…this kind of call to action is extremely ineffective.  You must be very specific about the next step you want your prospect to take. And that one step can’t make them feel like they’ve just been sucked into a sales process that unleashes a machine gun of emails on them.

Marketing Eggspert: What are your top 3 recommendations for people new to email marketing?

Winton Churchill: Recommendation #1-Focus on building trust with your first email campaign. The basis for all sales activity is trust.  The biggest mistake I see both new and “experienced” marketers make is trying to ram a sales pitch down the throat of a prospect before they have built trust.

Recommendation #2-Use a professional copy writer to prepare your first email campaign.  Writing for persuasion is very different than business writing. You have to do many things write and only 1 or 2 things wrong will doom your campaign to failure. If you haven’t studied copywriting in depth you will probably make one of those campaign killing mistakes.

Recommendations #3-Test, Test, Test: Start small with your campaign and test variations of your copy, subject line and call to action. Let your prospect base tell you what they like, you’ll be rewarded for your attention. Be sure you keep an accurate count of your client preferences.

Marketing Eggspert: Do you recommend entrepreneurs do their own email marketing or outsource it?

Winton Churchill: This is more a question of entrepreneurial style.  If you are “hands-on” you might want to try it on your own…some have the “knack” for writing copy, creating educational content, selecting lists, etc. But, if you don’t see good results right away, I recommend talking to a professional.

In the end it is all about how you want to spend your time and grow your business.  There are occasionally entrepreneurs that have a big success right out of the box.  They are a tiny minority. As a consultant I feel compelled to tell you the odds of getting it right before you blow a lot of money are pretty small.

As an example, I recently had a prospect come to me because they were frustrated that their email efforts weren’t producing good results. They has spent almost $4,000 putting together a campaign and had nothing to show for it.

We were able to suggest a different subject line strategy, change the email originator from a company to a person, slightly modify their call to action and their program began to work.

What is the most frequent mistake people reading your book are likely to make when they try to apply it on their own email marketing program?

They don’t quite understand what they don’t know and send out and email campaign that doesn’t do well. Each year we look at hundreds, maybe thousands of campaigns.  When you do that you develop a really good experience base for what works and what doesn’t. It is similar to finding a real good doctor.

In fact, we developed a service for our clients where they get a campaign all ready to launch, then they have us “score it” using a model we have developed.

We usually identify a few things that would severely limit the effectiveness of their campaign.  We typically make 3-6 recommendations on how to improve their campaign’s effectiveness.

We sell that service for $347 and offer it with a money back guarantee… if they use the recommendations and don’t see a satisfactory increase in their response we cheerfully refund their money.

This service takes everything we know about email and puts it at the point of greatest impact… so clients like it.

If readers would like to buy the book they can go here:

http://snipurl.com/emailbook

If they would like to see a table of contents and sample chapter they can go here:

http://www.churchillmethod.com/chapter

For more information, visit www.churchillmethod.com. Visit www.virtualblogtour.blogspot.com for the most up to date information. His full tour schedule is posted at http://virtualblogtour.blogspot.com/2008/06/winton-churchill-email-marketing-for.html. Winton Churchill is offering a wealth of free gifts for every person that purchases his book Email Marketing. Visit www.churchillmethod.com/bookbonus for full details about how to download all of these free gifts.