Engaging Newsletters for the Marine Industry

Episode Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast, where we cover marketing and website topics for the Marine industry. While you’re listening, subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And now, here’s your host, Harry Casimir.

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Hello and welcome to the Boat Marketing Podcast. Your go to source for digital marketing strategy, tailored for the Marine industry, specifically. I am your host, Harry Casimir, I’m the founder of Boat Marketing Pros. We are a digital marketing agency. We help marine businesses go to the next level. In today’s episode, we will explore the power of E-newsletter. Sometimes you may hear of email marketing, e-mail newsletters, and how you can engage your audience to make sure you drive more leads, more sales, and your customer loyalty stays up all the time. So let’s dive in. I’m going to tell you something personally, I believe, e-newsletters, and email marketing, is probably one of the most underrated piece of marketing that are often overlooked by business owners. You’d be surprised what this can do. In this episode, we will dive deep in the benefits of newsletters for marine businesses, different strategies your audience can use, and the different segments you can create, how to create engaging content, design some effective templates that really help your company to just go to the next level, and also how you can even help agencies or freelancers, whoever is working on your email marketing, e-newsletters, and how they can make it more effective for you.

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What I want to go over first though is I want to cover eight different type of newsletters, email marketing newsletters that you can use to ensure that you win customer day in and day out? The first one we’re going to go over is nurture. The second one is proposal. The third one is reactivation. Fourth, constellation. Fifth, review. Sixth one is referral. The seven one is prospecting, possibly by email. And the eighth one is specials. We’re going to go over all of that in terms of using email marketing for your company’s advantage to build your brand and your business, and create loyalty among your customers. Basically, where are we? Why nowadays more and more people using advertising versus e-newsletters? Because in the early days, e-newsletters was the king. Now, because everybody is getting so many emails on day in and day out, are we going to go over why e-newsletters continue to be one of the most effective marketing piece? Because we become reliant so much on pay ads, and there’s advantage to that. Pay ads give you a quick result. You just put it up today, and you get a lead, two leads, three leads tomorrow or right away.

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So that pays off right away, and you really go to specific targeting. You only want certain group of people in a specific demographic with that income. You can actually target those. There usually were very warm leads that come into pay advertising. Of course, oftentimes, if it’s done very well, it can be very profitable. Now, on the flip side, pay advertising can be expensive. There are a lot of competitors bidding for the same keywords that you are bidding for. Oftentimes, you are playing against bigger players that have bigger pocket, bigger budgets. So it’s a very steep hill to climb. So what do you do? A lot of it the thing with e-newsletters and email marketing, it’s a fault within ourselves, within the business. So that’s how we often time don’t really keep up. Because the problem is you will see, actually 50 to 60 % of inbound leads that come into a business, that’s been reported, uncovered. Imagine every two leads that a business get, one of them never get called, never get followed up on. 90% of web forms, meaning contact forms on those websites that, say, request a quote, 90% of them don’t convert.

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There are a few reasons they don’t convert. Then 80% of sales, as you guys know, one of the biggest problem with sales is that lots of follow-up is required, especially when you comes to business to consumer. It’s even more, so you’re looking at least seven to eight follow-ups before someone can actually see that. And oftentimes, very well, most salespeople give up, and the first 50% of salespeople give up on their first try, so they don’t even follow up more. As a business, how do you get over the hub, 80% of buyers, actually e-newsletters, buyers, say no four times before they say yes to buy something. If they don’t subscribe, they most likely will come back. What the conversion looks like when it comes to follow-up and email? As I mentioned, it takes up to five, six and seven follow-up to get someone. And oftentimes, the eighth follow-up, 20% of the time to the eighth follow-up, the ninth follow-up, they convert that into a customer. So what do you do? What do you do as a business to ensure you solve that problem? As of today, consumers, they get bombarded with tons of information on a daily basis.

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Ads, email, social media, you name it, they have it. You might ask, so what’s the solution to ensure that those leads get follow-up and making sure that you convert them eventually? So newsletter, email marketing is one of the sure ways to do that. And as I mentioned, there are eight different ways you can create this newsletter, which we’re going to go over one by one. But first, let’s talk about, uncovering the art of engaging newsletters for your marine business, specifically for the industry. As I mentioned, there are tons of benefits to the newsletter itself, from building loyalty, generating more leads, create customer awareness, so people know of your brands or when they see you online and display ads or Google search ads, when they come to your showroom, they are really well aware of who you are. And the other thing that you are able to do with email marketing is that you can create a very specific segment list of different audience that you have to create personalized information for them. Someone who buys a Bay board may not be so interested in a cruiser that’s going to hit the open water. Those are the two different type of marketing.

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Again, I’m not saying they are not able to. It’s just that those people think differently. People that want to stay in the Bay, they just want to stay in the Bay. So if you are able to personalize that type of message, you are in good place. And this is where segmenting your audience comes into place when you it comes to email newsletter. Obviously, creating the right content is crucial. That content is addressing their needs, their standpoint, and speaking to them directly. Creating a word map, and a clear blueprint on how to address each one of those is crucial. Now, let’s come back to those different email marketing campaigns that you can create to ensure you bring the user back to your business. Whether you are a boat dealer, boat rental, boat club, those emails, what we’re going to share with you here today, is basically can be used for almost any campaign. So the first one we’re going to talk about is prospecting. What is prospecting? It’s basically a call email you use for when you collect people’s email address, however method that you use. There are many different methods to do that, but those emails are emails that you can possibly even get for free.

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Use those emails to reach out to people to do that. One of the things you do not want to do, though, is spam people that did not request for your email. You have to be strategic on how to go about prospecting, especially prospecting to the end consumers. Business to business is a little bit, not easier, but a little bit simpler, whereas business to consumer is a little bit trickier. But you still can do that by getting the right information at the right time. The next one is nurturing campaign. Nurturing campaign is really what it means. It’s basically the consumer path to conversion and the potential. The lead path, the customer path to become a sales, really start with their brand, awareness. They start to educate themselves, and now they are informed. Once they become informed, they will engage. And once they engage, it’s much easier to Then that’s where the nurturing campaign comes to place. Because you can create those different drip campaign that would actually get people to know your brand, educate them about your product and services, inform them about what this can do for them. Then now you ask them to get engaged with you.

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But until then, don’t do that. Then this is where nurturing campaign comes to place. There’s constellation campaign. This is basically everybody that bought from you in the past is pure gold. This is like easy money. Think of it this way. Let’s use boat rental as an example. Boat rental, if you’re in business for the last 5, 10 years, you have to have hundreds, if not thousands of customers come through. Most of them give you their email address and sometimes even their cell phone. And oftentimes, people that bought today will most likely buy tomorrow or the next week. Those people, it’s not even a constellation. We call this reactivation, but it’s one and the same to some degree. People that you can actually use to retarget and send an email to them to remind them how much you miss them and you would love to hear back from them or get them back. You miss them, you want them, and you will see how that tie in into offering as well. And reactivation campaign means that people that went cold on you. People you haven’t heard in a while, people that we have done business with that came to your business.

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You can do this in two different ways. One of them is obviously sending the email, but also you can actually include text messages within the system as well. And a lot of it, those are per goal. Special offers, which is one of the last one, is offer that basically brings past, even present, and even possibly people that I’ve never dealt with, a possibly a way to bring them back. So simply sending an email that says, Hey, we would love to help. Here are the few things that we haven’t… Here are what’s going on. Here’s the new model and the dealer that has come in, and we actually have a special or the manufacturer is offering a 2% off or $5,000 credit. All of that are promotion special that you’re running. And maybe you both went through that basically have a slow season. To bring that off, offer a 10%, 20% off, and anybody that went between that date to that date. All of that opportunities that you can use for email marketing. The other one is review campaign. Review campaigns does two things. Obviously, a customer you serve, work with you, they leave, you send them, you request a review from them.

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But you also keep your brand right in front of their face. They cannot forget about you. This is why review campaign so important. The other one is the proposal campaign. I have seen this over and over where businesses send a proposal and forget about follow-up. Once you send that proposal, there should be an automatic email campaign that just go and go. It’s crucial to do that because, again, when you’re in front of someone all the time, they cannot forget about you. The worst that can happen is to tell you, No, I don’t want to move forward. At least now, you I don’t have to think about them anymore. Another one is, refer our campaign. Refer our campaign is basically asking your existing customers to refer you. There is no right or wrong way to ask. It’s just ask. Ask them, Hey, we want to increase our business this year, we would love to get your feedback or possibly even refer a couple of your business friends to us. Now, here are a few rules that I have when it comes to email marketing, especially when it comes to outreach. Be a human. Sometimes every time you read an email, you feel like a robot is worth this.

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Especially now with AI, artificial intelligence going well and everybody using it to write, it’s very hard to actually get good content out from people. You be a good human. Don’t be salesy. People hate to be paged, although people love to buy, but if it’s paged too early, they’re going to run away from you. Keep your pitching for later once they get to know you and they open your email a few times. Make it very personal. Instead of saying info@mycompany or contact@mycompany, send it with your name, your name@yourcompany.com, whatever the domain name is, so they can see it’s very personal. It means that you actually take time to do this, and people respect that. And the secret is in the follow-up. So email e-newsletters is really truly a way to follow up and making sure customers to get to the information that you want them. There are a lot of different lead follow-up systems, CRM out there to do that. I believe most of you guys are already using some type of software, get your team to use it to do that for you. Where do we go for a newsletter? E-newsletters should not, don’t make it complicated.

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As a marine industry business, what type of newsletter should you be sending? I just went over eight of them, and I think you could use all But let’s focus on the two key newsletters as a marine business that you want to make sure that you get whenever you have a chance. How often you should send them is at least once a month and send one newsletter, and I would swap them where one of them would be informational education, and the other one would be more of a branding and request engagement/making a call to action. We swap it one at a time. The first one, for example, January, you send a new newsletter. Talk about New Year. We’re looking forward to see you at the dealer or at the ramp. Here are the three things to be aware of, blah, blah, blah. It’s more of it, informational/educational, just so you know. The second one in February, you will send, it’s more of, Hey, I cannot believe it’s already February. Love to see how you engage. How’s your goal so far? I would love to see how we can help you reach it. Or relaxing underwater is one of the best meditation I heard people say it.

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Why don’t you join us X, Y, and Z? Whatever that might be. What that does is basically swapping those different newsletter will really help your brain stay in front of people. So even the customer that bought from you, they might even forget if you exist. Not like that, but people have a lot of things going on. But because your newsletter, they already give you your email, you have that information, just send us the email newsletter constantly to them. For most marine business, you don’t have to send it too often unless you’re in the e-commerce space. That’s a different beast on itself. But if you are a standard marine business, whether it be a boat dealer, boat club, boat rental, even a repair shop, you should take that chance and get a newsletter going at least once a month to ensure that you get people to be aware of your brand and stay in form of your brand and encourage people to forward other people. And keep it simple. So create a template in one of our favorite newsletter system, and then make sure it’s automated. You can actually automate most of the stuff that we mentioned to you.

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And this is something that we do ourselves for ourselves and for our existing clients. I believe in newsletter is one of the most underrated piece of software in the market from a marketing perspective, and you should be using it. So as we conclude with this episode, remember that engaging newsletter can strengthen relationship, drive your brands to the next level, and eventually drive result. Whether you’re a manufacturer, a dealer, or a boat rental, or a club, there’s a lot of potential in using newsletters to bring in more business to your fun talk. Also crafting compelling content that visually appealing and make people want to read your newsletter, capture the information, and hopefully, and hopefully convert a few of them into leads. Thank you for joining us on the Boat Marketing Podcast. For more digital marketing tips tailored to the marine industry, please visit boatmarketingpros.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and follow us. If you have any questions and ideas for future topics, please email us at podcast@boatmarketingpros.com, and we love to hear from you. Until next time my friend. Smooth sailing!

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Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marine Marketing Podcast. If you have any questions, send them to media@boatmarketingpros.com. For additional resources, visit boatmarketingpros.com/resources