1. Tell us a little bit about you & How did you start doing what you are doing?
Hi! My name is Adam Powers and I’m a marketer to sum it up short and sweet. Some people ask, “what kind of marketer are you?” But in all honesty, a marketer is a marketer no matter what genre they’re in or focused on. I focus the most on email marketing, copywriting, and converting paid traffic sources into sales. All three of those main topic area’s are benefited by and through effective email marketing techniques. Considering how important email marketing is it’s a shame more people online don’t take it as serious as they should. Most people now a day’s focus on social media marketing and just driving tons and tons of traffic to offers while never fine tuning their sales funnel or incorporating effective email marketing techniques to really reap the rewards of their hard earned efforts. Social media and driving traffic are viable marketing solutions, but without email marketing properly, you’re basically throwing your money in a black hole.
I started doing what I’m doing probably about close to 5 years ago, the days and years pass by so fast, sometimes it’s all a blur. But dabbling in something is different than really focusing on and doing it. I would say, I really started focusing on and doing effective marketing probably about 2 years ago. I started blogging, actually still run a very successful blog in the “Education” niche since I just love helping kids achieve more in school, as well as helping parents deal better with their children’s issues. From there, I began growing a list, but I had no idea what to do with it. Just basically collecting emails. I created a number of blogs, different topics, basically collecting emails via opt in box on all of them, but no real strategy to how to monetize my efforts.
It was about 2 years ago when I started getting involved in and dealing with online sales in general. I had promising music ventures in the works, when the whole music industry tanked, too much bootlegging and the spread of digital media basically tore apart any effort to make money selling digital downloads, at least for the smaller company. From there, I went into affiliate marketing which really helped me fine tune my marketing strategies. I was always good at driving traffic, and when I first started, I was one of those newbie marketers who drove tons of traffic to a sales page expecting it to convert, and some did. I made sales and was excited for a period of time, but that faded quickly since the effort required was so much with little reward in return. So I started looking around for viable marketing techniques and learned tons of stuff… long story short, I found email marketing to be the most effective and cost efficient marketing technique out there… not including attention marketing of course, but that takes much longer time and more effort to develop. Email marketing could be set up rather quickly and optimized easily.
2. What is the biggest tip you would give to a newbie email marketer?
The biggest tip I would give a newbie email marketer would be…. actually I have two, just because they’re both so vitally important. The first being, grow a double opt in list, don’t fall victim to the temptation of sending unsolicited emails. There are tons of companies out there who will gladly take your money and send out a million or more emails on your behalf, but you’ll be playing with fire. There are legal ramifications to sending out unsolicited emails and secondly, most of these companies that offer to send out mass emails to tons of people basically farm emails through various sources online or they buy them from those who farm emails.
Growing a double opt in list is much more valuable to you in the long term since only the owner of the email address themselves could opt in and confirm their subscription to your list.
The second important tip is that you need to grow your list at every opportunity possible. Making sales are great, but if I had to pick whether I’d rather take an immediate opportunity to make a sale or take the immediate opportunity to collect a prospects contact details, I would pick the later. Simply because, someone might buy from you, but you could never see them or hear from them again while if you took the opportunity to collect their contact information, then they made a purchase, a greater higher priced purchase could come from that customer down the road.
3. What is the biggest mistake that anyone who is starting on email marketing can do?
The biggest mistake a person starting out in email marketing could do is put in all the effort to grow a list then not market to them properly through email marketing. You need to think of your email list like it’s a living breathing entity made up of the life pulse of the niche you’re in. If you put in all the effort to grow a list and become lazy or don’t put in the effort to cultivate that precious asset, you’ll find your list will be stagnant and become unfamiliar with you. Which could lead to higher SPAM complaints, unsubscribes, smaller open rates if any at all, and definitely less overall engagement to your email messages when you do get around to sending something. Email marketing is a well oiled machine, if you don’t take proper care of that machine, it’ll stop working and all sorts of problems will follow along with it.
4. What would be the best way to make money from email marketing?
The best way to make money through email marketing is by building your brand. And by that I mean, making the people on your list familiar with you, who you are, what you do, what your passions are, and what your expertise is. Everyone has problems on the internet and everyone is looking for a solution. That’s the underlining common thread all over the internet. You want to build your brand to where people will think of you as a source of a solution they’re having. Once you do that, you could sell so much, and you could sell in all different price ranges. A lot of times, people online try to lower their prices because they’re standing behind the information they’re providing. They believe the information they’re providing is much higher in value than the price they’re asking and therefore they think people will just throw their money at them for those reasons. What they fail to realize is most people just flat out don’t feel comfortable buying something from someone they’re not familiar with. That’s why when a celebrity endorses something, all sorts of people start coming out of the woodwork to buy whatever they’re endorsing just because they’re familiar with that celebrity.
Now, I’m not saying you need to reach celebrity status, but you certainly need to become familiar to your audience. They need to feel comfortable and know you’re not some fly by night person who’s trying to get rich selling stuff to them. They want to buy and would be willing to buy at all different price points just as long as you’re familiar to them, they feel like they know you, you’ve established a trust with them that shows you’re not a gimmick. You do all of that through efficient email marketing and that alone will allow you to practically create a virtual bank account you could tap into whenever you’d like to make some money.
In a consumer study conducted it was found that brand familiarity was the number one reason a consumer bought something, the second reason they bought something was because of email marketing. The funny thing is, email marketing effectively actually builds brand familiarity. so they’re very closely related.
5. Who would you recommend, and why?
As an autoresponder service, I would recommend MailChimp. I know a lot of online marketers sing the praise of AWeber, and don’t get me wrong, they’re great. I actually have an AWeber account and a MailChimp account as well as other email marketing services, but my own testing shows that MailChimp is second to none when it comes to overall email deliverability which is probably the biggest criteria any email marketer should use to decide which service provider to go with. If you have the funds, you should really be signed up to a couple of different providers in case something goes terribly wrong with one provider, you don’t want to have all your emails in one basket so to speak.
6. What are your contact details (website, email, company, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, forum, etc)?
I could be reached best by my personal email at adampowers65 {{AT}} yahoo.com – feel free to send me a message with any questions you have, it doesn’t even have to be about email marketing, it could be about any marketing aspect since I’m fluent with lots of techniques. I’m always willing to help any way I could. Since I primarily focus on email marketing, copywriting, and paid traffic, I actually don’t have a website where you could reach me at in regards to email marketing. My domains in the marketing world pretty much revolves around squeeze pages and sales funnels. You could however connect with me on facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003072320768
And twitter at: http://twitter.com/MavenOfEmail
7. Any special offers or deals for our readers?
I sure do! If you’d like FREE additional training on email marketing, head over to
http://emailmarketingmastery.leadgenppc.com/email-marketing-mastery-training/
And sign up to the Expert Email Marketing Mastery Mini-Course. The mini-course is comprised of video’s I created, delivered as a series of presentations that discuss the major changes going on with email marketing today and what everyone needs to pay attention to in the coming future. Ignoring the changes with email marketing could easily put a major dent in your marketing efforts as well as your bank account. I also discuss how to avoid having your emails sent straight to SPAM and what you should be cautious about so you don’t ruin your email sending reputation. The third video talks about the one worded strategy that’s the number one most effective email marketing technique in existence today. As an added bonus, this one worded strategy is also the most powerful way to get your emails into someone’s inbox.
Although the FREE training is effectively powerful and you’ll learn lots by going through the video’s alone. I know some of you want the whole package from start to finish, which is why I created the Expert Email Marketing Mastery Course. The course is comprised of 8 modules that basically take you by the hand from start to finish in creating an effective email marketing campaign and email sales funnel that will drive your sales through the roof. You could pick this course up at: http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/470093-real-warrior-special-offer-introducing-expert-email-marketing-mastery-treasure-map-your-first-online-million.html
The course is offered at a significant discount because I’m still in pre-launch phase. Once the course goes on sale to the general public, it’ll be sold for $297. Consider this my gift to you for taking action early on. But hurry because this offer will be removed from that link the first week of November.
I hope you’ve all enjoyed this interview, until next time Expert Email Marketers. This is Adam Powers. Dream, Plan, Implement, and Succeed. Bye for now.
