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Thank you to email marketing specialist Liz Wilcox for joining Paul to talk about how to take the pain out of creating engaging and effective emails newsletters.
Liz Wilcox is an Email Strategist helping bloggers build online relationships, package up their “magic” and turn it into emails that people want to read and, most importantly, purchase from. In a span of three years, Liz founded, grew, and sold a successful blog. Since selling the blog, she has helped her clients master their sales by leveraging the power of strategic email. Offline, Liz lives in Florida, loves to run and is a walking 90s pop culture encyclopaedia.
Connect with Liz on LinkedIn.
Voiceover:
Fresh every Tuesday for MSPs around the world. This is Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
Hello there and welcome back to the show. Here’s what we’ve got coming up for you this week.
Liz Wilcox:
Every email has three jobs: get it seen, get it open, and number three, we want to get people to take action.
Paul Green:
I’ve also got some help for you this week. If you have zero leads in your MSP, if your leads bucket is completely empty, your shelves are bare, I’m going to show you how to go from nothing to your first hundred leads in around about 90 days or so. That’s coming up later on in the show. Plus, if you admit that your marketing completely sucks, I’ve got something irresistible that can really help you.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
Paul Green:
One of the core marketing messages that I’ve been putting out there for MSPs for the last few years is that they don’t know what they don’t know. And by they, I’m talking about the ordinary decision-makers, the business owners and managers that you most want to reach. And when I say they don’t know what they don’t know, I’m talking about technology, cybersecurity, all of this kind of stuff. They just have no idea because they don’t immerse themselves in all the stuff in our world that you and I immerse ourselves in.
Paul Green:
They really don’t know. I had a great lesson last weekend which reminded me that we all get to a stage with some things where we don’t know what we don’t know. Now, mine was where I managed to destroy a new watch of mine simply because I didn’t know what I didn’t know about the watch. Luckily, it wasn’t an expensive one. I have a very expensive watch. I have a lovely Breitling, which I bought myself when I sold my first business five years ago. I not telling you how much I paid for it.
Paul Green:
It’s the most amount of money I’ve ever spent on what is essentially a bit of bling, a gift, a self gift. I do look after it very well. I certainly wouldn’t take it anywhere near water. Because although it’s like splash proof and you can get it down a few meters in a swimming pool, apparently I’m not doing that. It’s a really expensive watch. I’m looking after it. We at the weekends went to Center Parcs, which are these great sort of parks, holiday parks here in the UK.
Paul Green:
They’re set within Woodland and they have all these lovely lodges and a massive, massive swimming complex with slides and flumes. My 11 year old daughter, she adores going to Center Parcs and she loves… Basically we spend as much time as we can in the swimming pool. I’ve always fancied just having a watch on in the water, so I bought myself a diver’s watch. Now, I only got it off Amazon. I know. I know.
Paul Green:
Amazon’s not the best place to go and buy things like watches, but it was only like a hundred quid, a hundred pounds, which is about $120, $130. It said it was waterproof down to 50 meters. Well, that’s perfect. It’s a watch so that I can tell the time any point when I’m in the pool at Center Parcs. I got this watch off Amazon. Took it to Center Parcs at the weekend. Kept it strapped on my wrist the whole weekend. And it was great. We had such good fun at Center Parcs.
Paul Green:
And then on the drive home on Sunday evening, I just kind of glanced at my watch to see what time it was. And do you know what I saw on my wrist? Condensation. I couldn’t see what time it was because of condensation. My watch was absolutely full of water. Now, don’t get me wrong here. If you buy something that’s certified as a divers watch and $130 isn’t cheap for a watch, is it? You can buy a watch for $10. That will be cheap. But $130, a hundred pounds, that’s not that cheap for a watch.
Paul Green:
And it specifically says it’s certified for 25, 50 meters, whatever it was. As soon as we got home, I was straight onto Amazon talking to customer services. “My watch has… I only bought it. Nah, nah, nah.” You know what it’s like when you’re talking to Amazon like that, and the customer service representative who clearly has a bank of questions to ask people in this situation said, “Can you explain to me how you used the watch?”
Paul Green:
So I said, “Well, yeah. We’ve been away for the weekend. We went swimming. I kept it on in the swimming pool.” And he said to me, “Great. Swimming pool shouldn’t be a problem. Can I ask, did you go in a hot tub at all?” And yes, I did. Well, it wasn’t a hot tub. It was like a jacuzzi. There’s like a hot plunge pool at Center Parcs. And yeah, we sat in that hot pool for about 10, 15 minutes or so. Now what I didn’t realise is that you’re not supposed to take divers watches into really hot water.
Paul Green:
They’re fine in just heated swimming pools, but no, not when it comes to some kind of heated jacuzzi or hot tub or something like that. So essentially I did the damage myself. Now, I’m not one of those people to try and gain the system. I put my hands completely up and said, “Duh. I’m so stupid. I really should have read the instructions.” No one ever reads the instructions anymore, do they?
Paul Green:
I’ve now got myself a hundred pound diver’s watch that’s dripping with water and it’s going to go in my airing cupboard for the next couple of weeks, see if I can fix that. Apparently I have already done the damage to the seals. Whenever I take it into water from now, it’s going to fill up with condensation. It’s a life lesson. Do you know what? I don’t know what I don’t know about diver’s watches. What a great reminder that was for me just how small details can really come and catch someone out.
Paul Green:
Now, the reason I’m mentioning this to you is not just from a marketing point of view, but you’ve got to think of your existing clients. Assume your existing clients at some point are going to do something stupid, like I just did something stupid. They are going to click on a phishing link. In fact, I read a stat last week that 46% of employees will click on a link that they are pretty sure is not a valid link.
Paul Green:
They’re pretty sure it’s a phishing link, but they’ll click on it anyway because they’re scared of missing a task that’s been allocated to them. Duh! If they’re willing to do something like that, you know at some point they’re going to click on a link like that. You know at some point they’re going to do something and give themselves ransomware, or they’re going to do something stupid like taking on a whole load of new staff and not telling you about it until an hour after they’ve actually started.
Paul Green:
I’m sure you could tell me all the stupid things that clients do and all the problems it causes you and your team. Your mindset should be that even with your clients who’ve been with you for 10, 20 years, your mindset should be, they don’t know what they don’t know. Both for your existing clients and certainly for your prospects, you’ve got to be constantly asking yourself, how can we educate people? How can we teach them about the things that they need to know, even though they’re not that interested in learning about them?
Paul Green:
How can we make these things relevant to them? We’re seeing a rise right now in the CSP platforms, things like Invarosoft, and we had Jamie Warner… We had a special with Jamie Warner, the owner of Invarosoft, back in episode 88, back in July this year. And one of the wonderful things that these platforms can do is help your users to self-educate. You can have videos and things in there.
Paul Green:
There’s all sorts of things that they can do to self-educate themselves, which makes life easier for them because they’re in a situation of saying, “Oh yeah, that’s why that keeps happening.” But it also makes life easier for your techs as well, because it must be pretty frustrating having to explain the same old things again and again and again.
Paul Green:
How can you create a culture for you and for your technicians remembering not in a rude way, but just in a realistic way, they don’t know what they don’t know, so that you can help your clients and you can help your prospects and along the way strengthen your relationship with them so they make fewer stupid mistakes?
Voiceover:
Here’s this week’s clever idea.
Paul Green:
Sometimes people ask me, how do you actually make money, Paul? You do these podcasts, and you write all this stuff, and you’re always on people’s webinars, but where does the money come from? Well, we have a core service. It’s called the MSP Marketing Edge. I’ll tell you about that in a second. But one of the things we do with our membership is we’re constantly adding value. I want it to be like Amazon Prime, where you pay your small fee every month, but the membership and the value just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Paul Green:
One of the things I’m doing at the moment is every week I’m recording a brand new bite-size training course for my members. And in fact, I’ve just finished one today. I literally finished recording it about 20 minutes before jumping on to recording this podcast. And I thought you’d find it kind of interesting. It’s called From nothing to your first hundred leads. Now, the bite-size training course itself in total, it’s around about 15… I think it’s about 18 minutes long.
Paul Green:
I’m not going to go through the whole thing, but let me take you through what this course is designed to do or what this thinking process is designed to do, and then what you should actually do. So every now and again, I talk to an MSP who has nothing. Their marketing pot is empty. They have no one to talk to at all. And this isn’t just the startups, by the way. In fact, it’s kind of rare, fairly rare, to talk to a startup with no one to talk to.
Paul Green:
Because when you first start the business, you throw yourself into it with such vigor and such energy and you do stuff with a degree of urgency that it just generates leads. What tends to happen I think with some MSPs is when they do no marketing whatsoever and they’re caught in the comfort trap of lots of monthly recurring revenue and great retention and they get comfortable doing no marketing. And then one day they lose a client, often through no fault of their own.
Paul Green:
Perhaps the client goes bust or they get bought or something like that. It suddenly makes the MSP owner realise, oh my goodness, we’re not doing any marketing. We lost this client, and we’ve got no pipeline to replace that client, and there’s no pipeline for growth. So that’s why I put this course together, From nothing to your first hundred leads, and it’s designed to be like a 90 day program. The very first thing I recommend is getting your marketing fundamentals sorted.
Paul Green:
The marketing fundamentals really for you or your website and your LinkedIn. Those are kind of like the shop front. People do judge the book by the cover. If the shopfront of the book cover is tatty and old and a bit out of date and just not very emotional, people are not going to shop there. You could be the best MSP in the world at a technical level. But if your website and your LinkedIn are Dowdy and old and out of date and just a bit uh, then the people are never, ever going to consider you.
Paul Green:
You’ve got to get those two basics done first, and you can go back previous episodes of this podcast. In fact, if you go back to episodes 62 and 63 from January this year, we had two specials on websites and LinkedIn. That’ll help you get those fundamentals sorted out. Now, one of the fundamental, which is something I never normally talk about and you need to get this right for this plan, is getting your business card sorted. Now, hang on, Paul. We’re in COVID. Do we need business cards?
Paul Green:
Well, yes, absolutely you do need business cards. Because one of the things I’m going to suggest to you, there are three activities to go from zero to a hundred leads. And one of them is to get up, get out, and go and do more networking events. The kind of business card I recommend is just keep it very, very simple with your name, your basic contact details, but you must, must, must put a photo of you on the business card.
Paul Green:
This is one of many things I’m going to talk about in this segment of the show that’s going to push you out of your comfort zone. Because putting a photo of yourself on a business card seems like a real egomaniac thing to do. I don’t really use business cards anymore, but I found an old one I was using a couple of years ago when I was out meeting people. It’s got a photo of me on the back of it. It’s kind of a fatter, younger version of me.
Paul Green:
The reason I put my photo on the business card is because you meet someone at a networking event. You shake their hands. You talk about stuff for five minutes, and then you’re gone and they’re never going to remember your name or even what you do. People just don’t work that way, but they will remember your face and critically they will remember how you made them feel. That’s the key thing when you’re doing any kind of networking or indeed talking to anyone, you’re trying to influence them at an emotional level.
Paul Green:
We were talking about people that don’t know what they don’t know. When someone doesn’t know what they don’t know, they’re not thinking about things cognitively. They’re certainly not making buying decisions cognitively. They’re doing it with their emotions. They’re doing it with their heart, and they’re going to be doing it. They’ll pick an MSP that they like. When you’re meeting these kinds of decision makers, you want to make them like you. You want to be warm to them.
Paul Green:
Ask them lots of things about their favourite subjects, which is themselves and their own business. And you want to make sure that’s all associated back to your face. Your face is your trademark. It’s your brand. It’s your logo. So make sure it goes on your business cards. Those are your fundamentals you’ve got to get right. Then there are three activities that I recommend you do on a daily basis. The first of them is LinkedIn. You work LinkedIn like you’ve never worked it before.
Paul Green:
In fact, I recommend you find 60 to 90 minutes every single weekday to work LinkedIn and do these other activities. And on LinkedIn, you work on the three C’s. That’s connect, contact, and content. You connect to new people every day. You contact new people using messaging on LinkedIn, and you’re looking to add value when you do that. Don’t just send them all the same message. Perhaps comment on something that’s on their website or send them something that might be useful.
Paul Green:
LinkedIn messaging is great in that you get 100% deliverability. With email, you never know if the email has actually got there, but LinkedIn you know whether or not the messages got there. They might not open it for a few weeks, but it is a great way to try and contact people. And then the final C is content, is putting content on LinkedIn on a daily basis. I can help you with that. Tell you more about that in a second. The first daily activity is LinkedIn.
Paul Green:
The second daily activity as predicted by the business cards is to get out there and go networking. In fact, I’ve challenged my members to say how can you attend three networking events every week. I’ve challenged them to put together in this training course a networking calendar literally for the next 90, 100 days or so they know which events they’re going to attend three times a week. Things like BNI, the Chamber of Commerce or Trade, other business groups.
Paul Green:
Thinking about if there’s not enough networking events in your town, what’s in the next town, that kind of thing. Now, you very rarely generate business from networking alone. That’s not really the point of it. The purpose of networking is to meet people, build connections, and linking to other people’s networks. Not online, but offline. Somebody you meet at a networking meeting today might know someone who knows someone who really hates their MSP right now. And that’s the power of networking.
Paul Green:
And yeah, I know you got all the cliches in networking, the early starts and the horrible breakfasts and, oh, you’ve just gone to three networking events in a row and it’s the same people at all three events. I know that can be a bit depressing, but you’ve got to work it. It’s a great way of building up a reputation. It’s a great way of building up some momentum and just getting yourself out there and meeting people. I know it’s scary.
Paul Green:
And if you can’t do that right now because of COVID, then it’s certainly something to look forward to do when you’re allowed to do it. But if events are happening in your town or city right now, I would encourage you to get out there. Stay safe, of course. Make sure you take all the right precautions, but ultimately, physically meeting people face-to-face is such a powerful thing to do. And then we get onto the final daily task which is picking up the phone and calling people.
Paul Green:
In fact, wouldn’t it be great if you could phone people for 30 minutes a day? Yes, 30 minutes a day. You picking up the phone calling people, either people that you’ve met at networking or people who are in your database. Now, if ever I was going to suggest something that would put you out of your comfort zone, it’s picking up the phone and calling people. But here’s the thing, the phone moves things on massively. Emails, LinkedIn, videos, websites, all of that stuff, it’s great.
Paul Green:
It’s efficient. It’s digital. It’s brilliant and you don’t have to have a great deal of pain with it. But picking up the phone? Come on, Paul. Are you mad? Picking up the phone moves things forward. It’s how you find out in just a five minute phone call that someone really doesn’t like their incumbent MSP. It’s very, very smart. And you know what? If you really can’t do this yourself, go and hire someone to do it on your behalf. It’s a great job for a back-to-work mum to call people.
Paul Green:
If you do do it yourself, there’s a great way to gamify it. You can use the paper clip game. Get two glasses. Let’s say you wanted to make 10 calls a day. You put 10 paper clips in one of the glasses. And every time you pick up the phone and dial a number, you move one of the paper clips over to the empty glass. You can see the goal here is to move all the paper clips from one glass to another. It’s a simple psychological trick.
Paul Green:
Essentially you trick your brain into saying, “Hey, I’ve started this job here. I’ve made three calls. We need to finish this. We need to do this next seven calls.” It’s a very clever way to just make yourself do it. Now, there’s three very simple activities there. That’s not what I would recommend to a mature MSP that’s got a pipeline already. For a mature MSP, there are many other smarter things that I recommend.
Paul Green:
But if you have absolutely nothing, your lead bucket is empty there, if you could make a 90 day commitment to doing that, you will fill yourself up with at least a hundred leads. I bet you money that you will generate a couple of decent prospects out of that. And you might not win your first client in that first 90 days, but you are going to be well on your way to winning another client just from working the numbers and putting in the activity.
Paul Green:
It always pays off when you do the activity and you work the numbers game because you build up some awesome momentum.
Voiceover:
Paul’s blatant plug.
Paul Green:
I mentioned my service there, the MSP Marketing Edge. What we have created is a toolkit of everything you need to market your MSP. So on one side, we give you regular white label content. This is marketing content that you can use to get new clients in your area, so educational guides, videos, emails, social media. There’s an absolute ton of stuff. On the other side, we’ve got a community. We’ve got training. We’ve got direct world-class support to help you with doing your marketing and growing your business.
Paul Green:
It’s a complete package of everything that you need. It’s only 99 pounds per month if you’re in the UK. Or if you’re in the US or anywhere else in the world, $129 US dollars a month. It’s really cheap. The reason it’s cheap is because we’ve got more than 500 members. It’s like, as I said, Amazon Prime, we can keep making the value bigger as we add more members. Here’s the rub though, it’s only available to one MSP per area. And once we have sold it to an MSP, we genuinely lock it.
Paul Green:
In fact, you can go onto the website and you can see whether or not someone has beaten you to your area. If you go to mspmarketingedge.com, it’ll then ask you to choose between the UK or the US site. If you’re in the UK, enter your post code. It’ll tell you whether or not someone’s already locked your area. And in the US sites, you enter your zip code. Again, the same thing. If someone has already beaten you to it, please do join our waiting list.
Paul Green:
We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of MSPs on the waiting list for various areas waiting for those areas to become available. By the way, if you’re in anywhere else in the world, not in the UK or the US, there are instructions on the website of how to contact us, because we do have clients… I think it’s in about 24 different countries, loads in Canada, loads in Australia, and lots of other countries as well. Go and have a look. See if someone else has beaten you to it at mspmarketingedge.com.
Voiceover:
The big interview.
Liz Wilcox:
Hi, I’m Liz Wilcox. And you know that feeling you get when you go into your email service provider because you know you’re supposed to do email marketing, but you think, “What the heck am I supposed to write? How am I going to get people to actually care what’s in this email?” Well, I help solve that problem.
Paul Green:
And you’re very welcome on this show for exactly that reason, Liz. Thank you for joining us. A couple of weeks ago, we had Adrian Savage on, who is an email deliverability expert and he was talking all about how to get into the inbox. It was really interesting, because one of the things he mentioned was the need for high levels of engagement. And that the email providers like Gmail or Microsoft, they’re watching. And if people don’t actually open your emails, that’s a mark against you.
Paul Green:
Now, I’m sure you agree with this, because one of the things I know that you’re a big fan of, Liz, is getting your open rate up. How do you do that? Is it all about what you put in the subject line?
Liz Wilcox:
Every email has three jobs. Number one, get it seen, right? Get it into the inbox. So definitely listen to that podcast. Number two, you want to get it opened, right? We want to open it. And number three, we want to get people to take action. In order to get people to actually open it after we’ve done a good job of making sure our deliverability is really up there, we want to make sure we welcome new leads in a way that gets people to tell about our company in a way that makes a personal connection.
Liz Wilcox:
People buy from people and companies that they trust. But basically we’re just welcoming them in, talking about who we are, why we’re in their inbox, and how we can help them. Because remember, people don’t care about your company. They care about what your company can do for them.
Paul Green:
You literally took the words out my mouth. That’s the exact phrase that I use and have used on this podcast before. Why do you think most MSP owners and other business owners, Liz, find it so difficult to do email marketing?
Liz Wilcox:
Paul, there’s not a lot of good advice out there. When you Google email marketing, you listen to podcasts, a lot of email marketers will tell you to tell stories. But I think a lot of email marketers, they start off as copywriters who are paid to tell stories. Paid big bucks to sit on the phone with customers and then craft this amazing, really interesting story that’s going to go well on social media and hopefully in the inbox as well.
Liz Wilcox:
But especially in a post-COVID world, your customer is likely very I guess like technology burnt out, right? They are watching Netflix while scrolling on their phone, while their spouse is next to them. Hey, check out this TikTok I just saw. They’ve got two, maybe three screens in their face all at once. When you get into the inbox, if you are just telling stories every single time, it’s going, “Oh, I don’t have time to read a story. I’m just going to keep scrolling.”
Liz Wilcox:
Or I find the opposite of this is if you are just providing what I guess you would typically think of as a newsletter where it’s kind of like the old school 1980s, 1990s company memo, note from CEO, right? These are the sales we’ve got going on, or this is the new product that’s coming out or whatever. People are going to turn a blind eye to that because that’s not as exciting as the TikTok that their spouse is showing them of some dog falling into the water. Whatever, right?
Liz Wilcox:
When we can craft a mixture of that, when we can make a personal connection instead of just telling this big, long story that’s drawn out, that nobody wants to read and you don’t have time to write, while also giving those company updates about what the next launch is or what’s coming up for sale, that is when you can really grab attention because you’re making that personal connection. People are going to buy because they trust. I’m an MSP, and this is what’s happening in my company.
Liz Wilcox:
The CEO just did X. Just making a little personal connection. Like if I was writing a newsletter for Paul, the personal connection might be, “Hey, I just did a podcast with Liz Wilcox. It goes really well with the deliverability podcast that came out three weeks ago. Anyway, what I wanted to update you on is on Black Friday this year, we’re going to do X.”
Paul Green:
Sure. So that personal connection, is that about showing that you’re human and that you’re real and that you’re not just this company behind an email?
Liz Wilcox:
Exactly. People want that personal connection nowadays. There’s a reason why Coca-Cola, Nike, Apple, all these giant corporations are making a stand for social justice, making commercials about women’s empowerment, et cetera, et cetera, because we now know the consumer wants that personal connection, wants to know that the company cares about humanity. Whether your company has got two people on your team or a hundred, the consumer wants to know that there are people behind whatever it is you’re driving.
Paul Green:
Most of our listeners are operating in the B2B sphere, so they’re businesses and they’re looking for other businesses. We know that when MSPs go looking for new clients, it’s a very long sell. Most people stick with their MSP for years and years and years. You’ve got a two to three week window once every five, 10 years maybe where you can actually have a conversation with them about them switching from one MSP to another.
Paul Green:
Now, I’ve been a big fan for years for using emails along with social media and other elements, but using emails for building a relationship with people before they’re actually even thinking of switching. What are some of the things that you would recommend to build that relationship in the long-term?
Liz Wilcox:
Like I mentioned earlier with the welcome sequence, you want to give them some kind of value very quickly. If they are getting on your email list or you’re getting their email, give them some sort of value upfront. In the B2C world, we often call it a freebie or something like that. I would suggest providing some sort of value. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Oh yeah, we’ve got this kind of PDF or that. Just giving a quick value add to them really helps right off the bat.
Liz Wilcox:
And then just a quick introduction to yourself and to your company. And then I suggest also crafting up some content that is really good for them. Whatever is relevant to your ideal customer, putting it out there on the internet for them and showing what you do best. For me, I’m an email marketer. What I do best is writing newsletters really quickly. I’m also really good on video. Some of my emails, I literally make a video of myself and show exactly how I write it very quickly.
Liz Wilcox:
Also, making video. We don’t often associate video and email, but putting that into your emails, crafting videos, and maybe even honestly creating a GIF, G-I-F, on giphy.com is very, very easy. It gets your face right there in the email because you can’t actually embed videos into emails, but you can create a GIF of just a small portion of your video. And on the bottom, you can put something that says click me. They click over it. They’re immediately seeing you, hearing you.
Liz Wilcox:
You’re giving them your best type of advice, whatever content you’ve got for them, and that just makes that personal connection. Remember, people are buying from people and companies they trust. The sooner you can get your actual face in front of them, I recommend doing that in the first couple of emails. Hey, I made this video for you, Paul. Click here to check it out, and there’s a GIF of your face and you’re moving. I recommend the GIF because you’re moving, right? And it really entices, it really engages them.
Liz Wilcox:
Like, oh my gosh, they made me an actual video. Now, if you’re doing more one-to-one emails, like if you’re going back and forth with clients, I recommend you doing this too. I usually take a sticky note and I’ll write, “Hey Paul,” and I’ll put it in front of the camera. That’s just a side note for you, as you move along with emails and you get to that one-to-one scenario. I also recommend setting expectations. If I’m emailing you, you can expect I’m going to email you once a month with tips on X.
Liz Wilcox:
I’m going to offer you these types of services. I’m going to have this type of products. I’m going to help you understand this about the industry. Whatever you plan on doing, set the expectations. Think about when was the last time you went to college or university or even elementary school. The teacher always starts with the objective. They always try to set expectations, right? If you can do that in your emails at the very beginning, like I just said.
Liz Wilcox:
And then as you write your email, say, “I’m sending this email because X.” If you can say that right away, it’s going to help people know exactly if it’s worth their time or not to read. And then if you’ve got any sort of big call to action, if you’ve got a community, you can invite them to the community. Hey, let’s book a call to talk. Always invite them right up front to do that.
Liz Wilcox:
Like Paul just said, it might take years for them to actually do it. But the more you put the offer out there, the more you’re going to see success.
Paul Green:
This is great stuff, Liz. It really is, although you have started a controversy because is it a GIF or is it a GIF?
Liz Wilcox:
Let’s leave that to the Twitter wars.
Paul Green:
Okay. We’ll do a public vote perhaps in our MSP Marketing Facebook group, GIF or GIF. I don’t know the answer to that one. I really don’t. So maybe we can get a definitive answer. Final question for you, Liz, you said earlier that you can write a really good email newsletter in 20 minutes. And of course, you can, because you’ve been doing this for 200 years.
Paul Green:
But for the average MSP who hasn’t and perhaps look at it and looks at a blank screen, a blank Word document with the cursor flashing and actually feel sick inside, what’s an easy way, a quick win to get started and just get some email marketing going?
Liz Wilcox:
Sure. You just follow the 20 minute framework. Basically put your greeting out there. Hello, prospective client, first name, whatever, and then give that personal connection, that personal update. Think about something in the last seven to 14 days that has happened in your company that could make a personal connection. Maybe Larry cooked fish in the microwave and it stunk up the whole break room, or maybe you recently landed a new client and that was very exciting for you.
Liz Wilcox:
You could share that win, or you could share something funny. But think of it as you haven’t seen your mom in a few months. You pick up the phone. She asks how are you doing. Hey mom, I’m doing great, except Larry, he stunk up the break room earlier today with the fish. And just that two to three sentence personal connection, something human that everyone can relate to.
Liz Wilcox:
It doesn’t have to be wild or crazy or anything like that, but just something that they can relate to quickly, and then just segue way into whatever content you have for them. Hey, I just wanted to let you know about X service, et cetera, et cetera. You can segue way very easily. You can literally type in the word anyway… What I really want to share with you today is X, and then just share any of those details and then sign off. I always recommend saying something like, I’m here to help.
Liz Wilcox:
If you have any questions, let me know. I’m sure the deliverability, we talked a lot about getting people to reply. You can invite them to reply with any questions, invite them to book a call, whatever you want them to do, and then just sign off.
Paul Green:
I’m never letting Larry near the microwave ever again. How dare he?
Liz Wilcox:
There’s always a Larry.
Paul Green:
There’s always a Larry. Liz, tell us a little bit more about your business and tell us how we can get in touch with you.
Liz Wilcox:
Sure. I’d love for you to find me at lizwilcox.com. If you listened to this episode and you think, “Yeah, Liz, that still seems really hard. 20 minutes. I don’t know how to do it,” I actually have an email marketing membership that is $9 a month. I literally write a newsletter every single week from different business perspectives that you can take and make your own.
Voiceover:
Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast. This week’s recommended book.
Reuben Swartz:
Reuben Swartz, founder of Mimiran, the CRM for solo consultants who love serving clients, but hate selling. I’m also the host and chief nerd on the Sales for Nerds podcast and one of my great guests was David A. Fields, whose written the book that I wish I had had when I started consulting. It’s called The Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients: 6 Steps to Unlimited Clients & Financial Freedom. It’s full of practical advice and I highly recommend it.
Voiceover:
Coming up next week.
Adam Walter:
Hi, I’m Adam Walter with Managed Services Platform, and I’m going to be here next week to talk to you about how to have better conversations, rather than just presenting data to your clients. This will help you drive better projects, more revenue, and attract key stakeholders to your conversations when you come onsite with clients.
Paul Green:
We’ll also be talking next week about whether or not you can use Facebook’s Messenger to generate new leads. Now, we all know that everyone is on Facebook, but is it actually a valid business to business, B2B leads generation tool? We’ll explore that one next week. Plus, we’ll look at a better way to improve your staff’s performances than doing appraisals. Not many people with their own business do formal appraisals, but they do consider it because, and I’m putting this one in speech marks, it’s what big businesses do.
Paul Green:
Well, just because big businesses do it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a great tool. I think that appraisals are evil and a way to demoralise your staff. I’ve got a much better suggestion for you, and I’ll tell you what it is in next week’s show. See you then.
Voiceover:
Made in the UK for MSPs around the world, Paul Green’s MSP Marketing Podcast.
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