Email is one of those things that, if you get it wrong, you will actually do damage to your MSP marketing list. Direct mail, not so much. If I mail people something and they aren’t interested, they just don’t respond. No big deal, they’re not going to opt out. They’re still getting it.
With email, if you start boring people, it’s too much.
By the way, there’s no perfect formula. Everyone asks, “How frequently do I send it?” Some people love getting a lot of emails, and they’re very responsive to them. Some people are just not. You can even just send them one email a week or one email a month, and it’s too much for them. There is no perfect formula; there is no “Here’s how often you need to send it out” because you’re sending it to individuals.
Every individual has different preferences, which is why you need to do multichannel MSP marketing.
You can’t be just online; you’ll need to be offline too. You’ve got to show up on LinkedIn; you’ve got to be on YouTube, and you’ve got to have a presence in other areas because if you’re just doing email, you’re only getting so much of the population.
I had a guy bragging, “I do email marketing to all my clients, I’m very good at it, and I get a great result.”
And I said, “What else are you doing to communicate with your clients?” … “Just email.”
So, I said to them, “You’ve been in business for 15 years. How many of your clients have opted out?”
He’s like, “I don’t really watch that.”
I said, “Well if you go back, you’re going to see there’s a big population of your clients that have opted out. If you’re tracking it, you’ll see a whole bunch of them are bouncing, they’re not being opened, and they haven’t opened your email in five or ten years because you can track this.”
So, you’re emailing them all the time. You think something’s happening, and they’re not even seeing it. As far as your clients are concerned, you don’t even exist anymore because they’re not seeing you. After all, the only way you’re communicating is by email. Do you see what I mean?
Some people won’t respond by email. They respond better to direct mail. Some people, they’ve got to see you face to face to do business with you. So, you’ve got to go to trade shows, and they’ve got to be referred. That’s why you can’t just do one thing.
It’s the Parthenon approach to MSP marketing.
The Parthenon, if you look at it, has multiple pillars holding up the roof. If one of the pillars gets knocked down, no big deal; the roof doesn’t come down because we have multiple pillars. But if you just have one pillar supporting the roof like email, and that stops working, then the roof comes down, and you’ve got nothing.