Dave Watson's Tips...

When you're doing email marketing, you can follow the same rules as the big companies do.

99% of people still check their email every day. Email is still the core of it all.

The key thing here is staying in touch with people.

You can increase your open rate by 20% to a 30% just by doing a resend a couple of days later to do not opens.

You want to write engaging emails that people respond to.

Call your bounce backs to improve sales

When you're out there networking and doing it, have a follow-up program.

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HOW TO GET YOUR EMAIL MARKETING STARTED

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Doug: Welcome back, listeners. Today, I've got a special guest in the studio. I've got Dave Watson. Dave has been in sales and marketing for over 25 years. He brings experience from the corporate world helping small businesses with their online marketing solutions. He has worked with his clients to help them grow their business through email marketing and integrating social media, blogs, website, and SEO to maximize their online marketing efforts. Along with being a leading partner, a service provider with Constant Contact since 2006, Dave has worked with many of the major email marketing services over the past 12 years. Dave, welcome to the Real Marketing Podcast.

Dave: Thanks, Doug. Glad to be on with you.

Doug: Super excited to talk about email. I love email, email marketing, and my listeners probably know that by just looking at how many of our podcasts are about email. You and I were chatting a little bit offline and looking at all the channels that are out there today, all the social channels and video, I guess one of the questions that you had mentioned was why are we still using email today?

Dave: Yeah, I get that question asked a lot, Doug, and I do a number of local presentations here in Vancouver, a lot of webinars, and we always like to start off with that "why email" because there are so many options today. People you referred to before say, "Isn't email dead?" I think at one point when all the social media tools were coming in, there were other options for people and people were getting tired of emails and the social media tools, it took them away to somewhere else, but in a way, it's come full circle.

When I do get a group together, I like to ask them, especially if it's a morning session, I always like to start off by asking them where have you been today? How many people have been on Facebook and if we got a group of say 20, 30 people in the crowd, about half at least will put up their hand, sometimes even more. You ask the same question about Instagram and LinkedIn, the numbers are a little bit less, and Twitter and a few other ones that are kicking around, and you ask people where they've been, but then you ask them how many people check their email?

Doug: Good question.

Dave: There's always one guy that hasn't, but pretty well 99% of people checked their email that day. It's not surprising. I figure email has turned into a social tool. It used to be email and social, but email is really a social tool. You're going into someone's personal space. The same way that you're entering their social sites, you're going to their email inbox. The strange thing about it is for someone to open up a social account, what do they need to have?

Doug:  Yeah, got have an email account.

Dave: Got to have an email, yeah. What's your username is usually your email to start off? Email is still the core of it all. One study said that if you add it up, everybody in all the social sites, it would pretty well add up to all the emails in the world. Facebook might have 60% of them,