More About Charming Marketing With ABDO
Well, gee, here’s another annoying article about marketing with emails and my upcoming ABDO program starting in April.
In this article, I wanted to share some of my profound (and possibly irritating) musings about what Attention-Based Direct Outreach is all about and how it can work for you to attract more clients.
Of course, it’s a not-too-thinly disguised attempt to get you interested in the program. But there are some tasty nuggets of marketing wisdom here, so grab a fork and napkin and dig in.
Why email can be so effective
I just got an email today with some interesting statistics about email that should make us all stand up and take notice:
– There are currently 2.6 billion email users, more than twice the number of Twitter and Facebook combined.
– An average of 21% of your emails will get opened.
– But only 6% of your Facebook friends will ever see your posts.
– And only 2% of your Twitter followers will see your tweets.
– US companies have generated 40 times more business with emails than Facebook and Twitter combined.
So, unless you have a huge social media following, it really gets diddly squat marketing results.
Conversely, if you are not leveraging email in your marketing, you are missing out big time.
Five big reasons most email marketing efforts fall flat
1. Most emails are boring. Even if what you’re sending is relevant to the recipient, it usually fails to engage them. Blah, zero impact.
2. Emails are usually sent by self-employed professionals, not as part of an organized campaign, but as a random, occasional activity. So they’re not done with a lot of thought and finesse.
3. But even the majority of professionally written and designed emails are boring. I get several hundred of them every week.
4. Emails to first-time contacts often try to persuade the recipient how great your services are. And it’s too much too soon.
5. We hate to get a no or be ignored, so it’s easier for our fragile egos to avoid reaching out with email completely.
Why it’s so hard to build a warm email list these days
When I started building my email list in 1997, virtually nobody else was writing about or offering marketing solutions for self-employed professionals.
Now, more than 20 years later, it’s a thriving, multi-million dollar industry. I now have thousands of marketing experts competing for the attention of the same clients.
And it’s probably true in your industry as well.
There now are thousands of websites, blogs, and email newsletters from other consultants, coaches, trainers, and other professional service businesses.
This makes it very hard to get noticed. And it’s also harder to get opt-in subscribers.
We all get too many emails already, many of which are of questionable value. So people are more reluctant to opt-in for anything online.
What’s a poor self-employed professional to do?
Why Attention-Based Direct Outreach Works
You need to find a way to reliably break through the noise and get the attention of your prospective clients.
The key idea here is attention. I’m sure that most of the people who send me emails want to get my attention.
The problem is, they just don’t, as mentioned above.
Very few are courageous or creative enough to send out an email that makes you smile or chuckle. They are pretty much deadly serious.
And if you go through your email inbox every day as I do, most emails get deleted in a nanosecond.
So you literally have a nanosecond to get that attention.
And the only thing that really works is something a little offbeat, charming and disarming.
Great emails are charming, fun, relevant, and sometimes a little off-the-wall. That’s what it takes to get attention.
The downside of this is that it can be really tricky writing such emails. It’s a bit of an art and it takes guts and chutzpah.
The upside is that there is virtually no competition for this approach.
My guess is that it will ultimately become very popular, but for now, the field is wide open. And almost nobody else even has a clue about it. This virtually guarantees you will get noticed.
What does this all mean for you?
Well, I’ve really just said three main things here:
1. Email still works better than any other online marketing method. And 100% of your prospective clients receive and at least glance at their email every day.
2. Most email marketing efforts are completely ineffective and your messages fall on deaf ears most of the time.
3. You can dramatically improve the effectiveness of your emails with this ABDO approach. It’s something you can learn, master and implement. And almost nobody else even has a clue about it. This virtually guarantees you will get noticed.
ABDO marketing starts with sending attention-getting emails to people you already know – your warm contacts.
And then as your skills and confidence increase, you can start sending emails to targeted prospects who even don’t know you (gasp!). And you’ll get more response than anything you’ve ever done before.
One of the biggest objections to this is, “Sounds great for others but it won’t work in my industry!”
But think of your clients and colleagues in your industry. I’ll bet they have as good a sense of humor as anyone else. Even morticians have a sense of humor.
Top executives in companies didn’t get where they are because they are boring, humorless drones. Well, some perhaps, but not most.
Charm and humor, if applied skillfully works on just about anyone.
What stops you from trying?
I got a call from someone interested in the program this morning. She told me that her biggest issue was that she was afraid to ask.
Afraid to ask for help, ask to meet with people, or to ask for the business.
I’ve noticed that if you’re not proactively reaching out, there’s always some kind of fear – the fear of making a mistake, or of being rejected or of bothering people.
The most important thing to remember, and to remind yourself of over and over again, is that you have something of real value to offer. (And if you don’t, why are you in business in the first place?)
You know your work makes a difference. And that gives you the right to approach prospective clients and get their attention.
Ultimately, if they need your assistance, and hire you, they will be grateful to you.
If you forget this you won’t feel worthy, courageous, let alone willing to reach out and connect with prospective clients.
Is this program right for you?
Well, if you can relate to everything I say in this article and you are tired of not getting results with your marketing and are ready to make a change, the answer is yes.
For all the nuts and bolts about the program, including pricing, visit this page:
https://actionplan.club/abdo-short
And if you want to read even more about this program, have some time on your hands and love silly graphics, then read this page:
And, of course, you are free to sign up now at this link.
As you’ll read, I’m so confident in this program that I offer a money-back guarantee.
I have faith that you can learn to reach out creatively with emails and get more attention, more meetings and more clients.
Cheers, Robert