The Secret Sauce

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A few years ago I wrote about how an Email Marketing Service was the ‘secret sauce’ in your marketing efforts. You can revisit that article here.

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Secret Sauce for the No 1 Marketing Tool⁠

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Remember that my focus is on small-firm architects, by which I mean firms of about 4 people and less than 15 people.

The No 1 Marketing Tool is xxxx

Nowadays I am no longer using MailChimp and things have changed a bit in what is available. Now I would recommend using ConvertKit. The key reasons are:

You won’t need a traditional blog, so it is simpler.

Scheduling is more flexible.

Tags are a fundamental feature of ConvertKit.

Everything is in one place and can be resent or reused.

You still have all your posts available to the public.

The 1,000 addresses limit for a free account should be plenty.

I will go into more detail about each reason next. Then I will walk you through getting set up.

BTW I am not an affiliate of ConvertKit, I do use a paid account to take advantage of additional features, but you won’t need them.

You won’t need a traditional blog, so it is simpler.

Rather than write and publish a blog post that is ‘picked up’ by your EMS using the RSS feed, you create a broadcast (sometimes known as a campaign). A broadcast is an email that is sent to your email list at the date and time that you specify. The workflow is very similar but there is no need to connect a blog’s RSS feed to an Email Marketing Service. One piece of software instead of two.

Scheduling is more flexible.

Each post has its own send date. With a blog’s RSS feed it can be set up to send on a certain day of the week, certain days of the month, or every time you publish a post. In effect this becomes your deadline. By sending broadcasts with ConvertKit you can send as soon as you write the post or schedule it. This allows you to prepare more than one email, but have them go out weeks apart. That isn’t in the nature of an RSS feed. I think it gives you a lot of flexibility.

Tags are a fundamental feature of ConvertKit.

When you create an email list, invariably not all names are in the same category. With ConvertKit you tag them as you import them or later one by one. Once tagged you can send emails to any or all of the groups you have by selecting the appropriate tags when selecting the send date. For instance you might have tags for prospects, current clients, contractors, and consultants. An announcement about holiday hours might go to everyone except prospects. Your marketing emails might go only to clients and prospects. Requests for bids would go only to contractors.

Everything is in one place and can be resent or reused.

Any broadcast can be duplicated and sent again. This can be useful when pursuing a specific prospect, among other scenarios. That holiday hours announcement may not change very much. It could be resent the following year in just a few minutes of effort.

You still have all your posts available to the public.

A broadcast can be added to a public feed that is part of ConvertKit. This gives it a unique URL so that you can link to it or display a page of your past emails, like an archive. Roughly the same as a blog.

The 1,000 addresses limit for a free account should be plenty.

All of this is part of the ConvertKit free account which has a limit of 1,000 addresses. Everyone in your list should know you. For the small-firm architect this almost automatically keeps you well under 1,000 names. Your office contact database is where you store all the people connected with each project. In fact the smaller this list is the better.

The Walk Through

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Option 2 - ConvertKit

Can be simplest solution with free account. Any size firm can do this, but it is the biggest help for the smallest firms because they rarely have any consistent marketing effort.

Import your email list once in a half hour. Create a landing page once in a couple of hours. Create a template once in an hour. Assemble/schedule a broadcast and add to ‘public feed’ in an hour every two-three weeks. Link to landing page on your website once x an hour, or embed it if you can. Add link in all your broadcast signatures once in a half hour. In less than a day you are up and running with a new marketing tool. Spend a half hour a week to use it to build a reputation.

The hard part is imagining the reputation that you want prospects to perceive. Competent (at what) and trustworthy (demonstrated how?).

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