You Ask, I Answer: Do We Need A List in 2019?

Jayme asks, “Do we need a list today or just a solid message?”

A list – meaning a database of customers and the ability and permission to reach out to them – is more important than ever. Watch the video to find out where message fits.

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Brief notes:

• Who: list
• What: message
• Where: channels/distribution
• When: timing
• Why: strategy
• How: execution

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.

In today’s episode, Jamie asks, do we need a list today, or just a solid message, a list, meaning a database of customers that, and the ability and permission to reach out to them is more important than ever. And it’s especially

important that you own your list.

So what I mean by this is, a lot of marketers think that your

Facebook page or Twitter page, or Instagram page, whatever, whatever the thing is, is your mailing list. It’s not it is an audience. And it is valuable, certainly not going to say that it’s not valuable, but you don’t own it, you have very little control over it. And at

any given time, as a whole bunch of people have found out over the years, your ability to reach or permission to reach that list can change in some cases drastically,

rewind deal five or six, six or seven years ago, when organic reach on social media was

all at marketers could talk about, hey, we’ve got so many fans, and so many fans on our Facebook page likes and all this stuff. And now, of course, as marketers look at the data,

they realized that these channels, the unpaid version of these channels is

not performing for obvious reasons. These companies, you know, Facebook and Google and such need to make money, and they make money by you running ads. So those pages, and those channels are not your list, they are an audience. And though they are a source from what you can harvest a list, absolutely. But they’re not the list itself, the list is one of six factors that we need in order to be effective,

those six factors are, they follow, you know, the, the six W’s who will where, when, why, and how. So

your list is who and this is vital, and you need to own your list. And it can be the the gold standard in

most marketing is, of course, the email address. But it can be text messaging numbers, or phone numbers, or mailing addresses postal mailing addresses

these days is really funny, you have to go where you have to go where your competitors are not paying attention.

And so while everybody on the cousin uses email, because it’s the least expensive channel, it may not be the best one that you might be

better off sending a piece of paper mail, because, you know, this is great chart, great comic cartoon were like 40 years ago, or 30 years ago, we were so excited to get an email, and they our mailbox is full of junk mail. And today, you know, we’ve got like 8 million emails. And the only thing ever comes in the postal mail is bills. So anything other than that is exciting to look at. So there may be an opportunity there. But it’s your list is a database of customers, and the ability and permission to reach out to them. So email, postal mail, phone number, direct, any kind of direct contact with those folks. And you can use direct messages on social, it is just going to be laborious, because many of the API’s for good reason haven’t throttled back and have significant limits on them, you have to do a lot of that work manually or outsource it to a contractor to do for you. You can’t automate it at nearly as well as used to be able to

the What is the message the what is what is it that you are offering of value that will

get your list to participate with you

it’s not what’s for sale, it’s what the value is that you bring.

And so make sure that the offer that the communication you’re

you’re giving to your list has

value that has benefit to them, regardless of whether they buy anything

that said it is okay from time to time to ask for the sale. But probably not the first thing you should do, you have to give first bi calls that givers gain you have to give before you earn the right to ask value in return. The Where is your channels and distribution

is not

just list it has all those other channels we talked about. You need those because that’s where you’re going to harvest released from you’re going to harvest the list from a website traffic from your social networks, from advertising, you need to build that database from all the places you currently get attention. So YouTube or LinkedIn or wherever it is that you get eyeballs, you need to convert those eyeballs to that list. The when is timing, when is the best time throughout the year. One of the best times that people are paying attention to or asking about thinking about the the products and services, the content you create the value that you deliver. And you would use regular Google Analytics can help tell you some of that search analytics will help you help you with understanding that and predictive analytics will help you with that as well. And forecasting when on any given day, week or month, people will be asking for your thing. The Why is the strategy which we hope you would have, which is why are we doing this thing? Why are we building a list? Why are we focusing on these channels. And it is the most important part.

But it

still is it’s it’s like the main dish have a meal, right? strategy is the main dish for meal. And you can have just the main dish for a meal. But it sure is nice to have appetizers and dessert and beverages and things, all the things that go with it strategy without the how, which is the execution is useless. Just like execution without strategy also useless. So that’s what what you need in order to for solo printers, all the way up to the biggest enterprises, you need to be very clear about what those six things are your list your message, your channels, your timing, your strategy, and your execution, why you’re doing to these things, what are you doing, how you’re doing these things. And I can’t emphasize strong enough

your permission based list

email, postal mail and phone or or SMS

is the most important thing that you can build in terms of marketing

value. Because it’s yours, you have control over you have control over

your reach to a much greater degree than you do on like, say, a social network.

As long as you do think, you know the basics of like, hey, let’s make sure we’re not flagged as spammers. And you have control over what content gets seen, which is really important is something my friend Ann Handley says, There’s no algorithm, the filters what people see in an email, if they open the email, they see what you intend them to see, when you publish, for example, on social media,

maybe 1% of your audience sees what you intended to see. But even when you’re paying and not necessarily getting to 100% of your audience.

So those owned

distribution lists are your gold mine, focus on them, build them, they are your insurance policy. If a social network goes south, and you have no email list, you’re in really bad shape. If a social network goes south, and you’ve got your list, you can say, Hey, folks, we moved over to here, follow us there, you can direct attention as needed. Again, for those of you who’ve been around in those the space for a while, you remember when my space was the big thing, and then it sort of cratered. And Facebook’s hook up its mantle.

If you are on MySpace and you’d spent 10s or hundreds of thousands of dollars to build your MySpace page, you hadn’t harvested that list and turned it into an email list, you had a very difficult time pivoting to Facebook. Whereas if you had list could say, Hey, folks, looks like my space is going the way of the dodo. Let’s all go over to our Facebook page instead. So you need that insurance policy. So great question. Make sure you build your list, build, build, build that list. And speaking of which, of course, please subscribe to the YouTube channel and subscribe to the newsletter list. I’ll talk to you soon. Take care one, help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is trust insights.ai today and let us know how we can help you

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