Push/pull marketing that’s a little of both: phone calls and email
Cover of one of Richard Jacobs’ books
Do you hate cold calls?
What if you could build your mailing list with fish that were ready to bite?
What if you asked for something from a prospect that was so small that you didn’t get the phone slammed in your face?
Try offering a newsletter that is specifically written for their certain niche.
Richard Jacobs is an online marketer specializing in serving attorneys. He built up his email list in a unique way – he cold-called lawyers. But he didn’t ask them if he could do their marketing. He simply asked if they’d like to receive a free weekly newsletter designed to help lawyers market their services.
It was a low-threshold offer, and many people accepted it, he said in an interview. He said he went from 20 attorney signups a week to over 200. He went from 2,000 on his email list to 12,000.
Two men made 150 calls a day. Between ten and thirty people a day took him up on his offer.
“We’re not selling them anything,” Jacobs said. “Like I said, it’s a low threshold. It’s like saying, ‘Can I shake your hand?'”
“Some opt out, some stay in. But I keep loading the funnel” (making calls to get more emails).
Don’t go cheap
And you know that if you go with those cheap services that steal emails, the quality of those names aren’t squat. (Besides, it’s illegal – against the CAN-SPAM act.)
“After a while, some of them would call and say, ‘I’ve been getting your emails, and now I have to call you.’ It was like I was torturing them in a nice way,” he said.
It took about seven or eight weeks of newsletters to start to see results. He says it is the consistency that makes it work.
After a while sending the emails, he now watches who opens them. And when they open the same email several times, it means that they are coming back to finish reading it. This is what he calls a “hand raise.” Either way, he calls up the most responsive and asks for consulting work. It is not a cold call, but a warmed-up call.
Hear this fascinating interview with Richard Jacobs and host John Fancher.
