Imagine you’re walking in an apple orchard, and you stop under an apple tree. Which apple do you pick?
Obviously, you’ll reach up and grab the apple right above your head, right? Everybody knows you should focus on the “low-hanging fruit” when you’re in an apple orchard.
However, many business owners ignore the low-hanging fruit in their marketing. I’m talking about those simple, easy things you can do to quickly generate more revenue.
And I think the main reason why business owners ignore low-hanging fruit is because they simply can’t see it. They don’t know that it’s there.
And so, today, I want to open your eyes to a big low-hanging fruit opportunity that you can take advantage of in your business.
I’m talking about email marketing.
Email marketing is low-hanging fruit because it’s a very effective and affordable way to bring prospects and customers back to your business.
Let me give you a quick example…
About a year ago, a young chiropractor named Sean came to me, looking for advice on how to attract more patients to his new practice.
Sean had been advertising with Google AdWords for a few weeks, and he had accumulated a list of about 50 people who had filled out a contact form on his website (providing Sean with their email addresses and other contact information).
And when these leads contacted him, Sean followed up right away to schedule an appointment. However, aside from the initial follow-up, Sean hadn’t done anything else to bring these people back to his practice.
Immediately, I saw the low-hanging fruit opportunity for Sean to put together an email promotion to these 50 people.
Because it was summer time, Sean offered these 50 people a discount on a “summer tune-up” treatment. The special discount was available for the next 7 days, and all people had to do was reply to Sean’s email to take advantage of the offer. **
Sean sent these 50 people 3 emails within the course of 1 week – and, as a result, he generated more than $1,000 in revenue. A thousand bucks from a tiny list of only 50 people. Not bad.
What if Sean built up an email list of 500 or 1,000 people? It would still take him the same amount of time and effort to create and send out the email campaign – but the results might be 10X or 20X greater. Instead of $1,000, he might have generated $10,000 or $20,000… all from sending out 3 emails.
(And in case you’re wondering, it’s not at all unreasonable for a local business or professional practice to accumulate an email list of 500 or 1,000 people — you just need to follow email marketing best practices.)
In my view, email marketing is the best “low-hanging fruit” marketing opportunity for small businesses. And it continues to surprise me that so many businesses aren’t using email marketing at all.
There are only 2 reasons I can think of why you wouldn’t be using email marketing in your business. Either you don’t see the potential, or you don’t know how to do it right.
Hopefully you can now see the potential. And we’ll be in touch with more email marketing tips later in the week.
** In those 2 sentences, I’ve just shared the 4 essential ingredients for an effective email campaign. Can you identify all of them? Stay tuned for our next article on Thursday to see if you got it right…
