It can be a very frustrating experience providing a high quality service and not understanding how to find customers. There are many different channels available and it’s important you use the right channels to reach your target audience. If you’re selling products social media is one of the based ways to go. Using video on facebook ads can generate a significant amount of sales.
Using social media, such as facebook, to sell high cost services can be a struggle though. You can convey the benefits of a product in 6 seconds with a video. How many benefits can you convey about your service in 6 seconds?
It takes time for potential buyers to know you and trust in your ability to provide a high quality service. This takes time. In this article we will discuss how email marketing is better suited to selling services than some social media platforms.
Building trust and credibility
People are more willing to buy when they trust the person selling a service. It’s impossible to establish trust and credibility with potential buyers in a 30 second video ad on facebook. Email marketing can help you establish trust and credibility by allowing you to send useful content to you potential buyers over a long period of time.
Sending free content to your mailing list allows people to know who you are while also demonstrating how good your service is. You can do this by giving useful advice that shows you are an expert in your area. This gives your audience a taste of your service and leaves plenty room for you to provide paid services.
As part of your content you should always include cases studies or testimonials of your customers. If you don’t have any customers you should offer your services for free in order to get at least 5 testimonials. Try to get 5 testimonials from people from very different backgrounds.
When sending email content a good rule of thumb is 5 to 1. Five useful pieces of content for every time you plug one of your services.
Automations and Custom Content
Two powerful aspects of email marketing are automations and custom content. Automations allow people who sign up for your mailing list to go on a journey. If you offer 5 different services and when someone joins your email list they are send free content broadly relating to each of your 5 services.
If the person clicks on only one of those topics they can be tagged as having an interest in a particular topic. When you send out future emails allo those who have expressed an interest in a certain topic will only receive content relating to that topic.
For example, if you are a fitness instructor. Your services are:
- Building muscle
- Losing weight
- Building endurance
- Staying fit over 50
- Staying fit while working 9-5
The first email a visitor sees covers an introduction to each of the above 5 topics with a link to read more. If a marathon runner signs up for your newsletter that person will only be interested in topics related to building up endurance. With email marketing you can tag the marathon runner as being interested in “Building endurance”. Any future content you send out talking about for example building muscle including customer testimonials will not be sent to the marathon runner.
This allows you to segment your mailing list and send content which your audience is interested in. This will boost your response rates, engagement and the main KPI, sales.
Response Rate
Studies have shown email marketing gets a much better response rate than social media. One of the mistakes business owners can make is investing in building an audience on social media. When you post content on social media it is estimated that only 10% of your audience will shown your post in their feed. Whereas with email marketing tools such as activecampaign and mailchimp can achieve delivery rates over 90%.
Further research has shown of those who do see your content email marketing has a much higher response rate.
Lower Cost
The major cost in email marketing is building your email list. Once your email list is created the only fees you need to pay are for your hosting and any email tools you may use such as mailchimp or ActiveCampaign. To achieve similar results to email marketing you will need to pay to run ads on social media.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
One of the biggest disadvantages of email marketing is it takes longer to setup. You can run ads on social media within 24 hours. It depends mostly on how long it takes to get your ad approved. Email marketing takes time to get started.
First you need to build you email list. You need to create something useful to give away for free which is called you lead magnet. Usually a guide in the form of a pdf or a video. If you are a fitness instructor you might create a video on a daily home workout routine that takes less than 30 minutes.
When you’ve done that you need to create a landing page where people can submit their email address. Luckily mailchimp offers landing pages as part of their free service for up to 2,000 contacts.
Summary
If you are running a service business which has a significant cost email marketing is something you should invest consider learning. There is a learning curve but in the long run email marketing outperforms social media marketing and costs much less than running ads.
The good news is it doesn’t cost a lot to get started. You can create your lead magnet for free using google docs. Ideally you should create a video or a mp3 if possible. You can run ads on facebook for as little as €10 to test the response to your lead magnet. You can test email marketing for as little as €50 – €100 with all of the costs going toward running ads on facebook to collect email addresses.
The key advantage of email marketing is giving your audience time to get to know you. While also giving you the time to demonstrate the quality of your service.
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