Why this course?

I have comfortably lived off the proceeds of direct marketing since 1984. Since then I have seen almost every rival invest all their money in traditional mass marketing systems like advertising, branding, and no end of other exotic stuff. None of which is easily measurable. All of which is massively expensive.

It's no different now, with a new process or service reaching out to us every month, each promising wonderful rewards. Through all of this I have stayed on the direct marketing path. I live in one of the most expensive countries on earth, deriving most of my income from a country with a currency that has lost most of its value over the last 10 years.

One of my European clients suggests that I must be a genius to be able to that! And then he says that a real genius would be selling into Europe and the USA instead of Africa :-)

Despite direct marketing working as well as it does, in this case direct email, fewer than 10% of my clients even try it. I hope that this short course, broken into small pieces adds a whole pile of value to your income-generating efforts.

Transcript of Video and Sound Track

Thank you for being here. I am Peter Carruthers and I have been using email to market and sell products and services to businesses and individuals since 1984. That’s long before email existed, of course, but here’s the thing: This selling process has been tried and tested since mail existed. Email just makes it faster, and cheaper, and a whole lot more fun.

This course sets out to show you how effective and easy email selling can be.

Everyone has an email account. It is the foundation of our digital existence. You can hardly set up an account for any online service without having an email account. Almost everyone reads their email every day.

Email is easy. Sending an email is something every single one of us can do. Reading an email is something each one of us does dozens of times every day. Email is as personal as we can get from across the web.

Email is addictive. We’re constantly drawn to checking email. Whether that be a notification from Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or a sales enquiry from our website or some news about Donald Trump doing something unusual. If an email is interesting, we read it.

Email is fast. I am often stunned at how fast emails are opened when I send out big emailings. Hundreds of emails opened within seconds. Dozens of clicks within minutes.

Email is cheap. You don't have to spend a cent to write an email. Nor do you have to spend a cent to send that email. Contrast this with any other mechanism, and the price is unbeatable. Placing Google adverts costs money for every click. And if you don't know what you doing it costs money to have somebody do it for you. The same applies to search engine optimisation. The same applies to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You need a modicum of skill to set up those mechanisms, and you need some money to place your advertising.

And when we talk about advertising in magazines or newspapers or on billboards we’re talking about different quantum of money. Even simply handing out brochures at traffic lights, involves a production cost and a labour cost.

Email is accountable. It does not need a rocket scientist to work out out the sales results from email campaigns.

None of these costs applies to email. At least, not until it has proven how effective it is for you. And when you scale up from one email each day to thousands each week, the price does not go through the roof as it does with any other mechanism.

But Email can also be very boring. When we think of using it to sell our stuff we think of spam. We all hate spam. We are all overwhelmed by the constant flood of it. We think we will be no better than the folk selling Nigerian lottery earnings or their bodies or technical products from China.

None of these is an excuse to not use email. Before we talk about marketing or selling and what they mean, let's just look at the benefits of email.

Email is easy. No skill involved. You send emails every single day.

How difficult would it be for you to send one extra email each day to a person who has expressed interest in what you sell. Or to a person who is likely to be interested in what you do.

Email is powerfully effective if you say the right words to people.

A simple example. One of my clients was involved with building a new office block. In a seminar we’d spoken about sending emails. She needed a dry-cleaning establishment as a tenant. She sent six emails to dry cleaning franchisors, describing the premises, asking them if they had any potential franchisees who might be interested. Three responded within 24-hour's. The premises were rented 24-hour's after that.

Email is very quick to start. Once again, if we contrast sending an email with the staggering technicalities of getting Google advertising right, search engine optimisation right, Facebook advertising right, linking advertising right, those tweets right, and the photographers and designers needed to create a reasonable magazine advert, or a newspaper advert or even a brochure that you can hand out at the traffic lights.

None of this applies to email.

Email offers very low risk. There is no upfront cost. There is no upfront commitment or contract. You get to prove it first before making a real decision about using it. Only once you see how effective it is for you need you worry about scaling up. And even then the scaling up a a fraction of the cost of any other mechanism.

In other words, email is the most effective do-it-yourself marketing and selling system on earth. And has been for more than 20 years.

It works. Both in the business to business environment and the business to consumer environment. I've used direct marketing, first letters, then faxes making extremely technical sales to businesses. I've used a combination of faxes and emails to sell insurance, consulting, specialist skills, training, seminar seats - to individuals and businesses.

If I was starting a business today my first marketing efforts would be by email.

You might notice that I haven't yet touched on any of the technical facets of email. I don't have to. You already know how to email. Right now, by sending out just one simple email each day, you will increase your income significantly. And the fewer clients you have the bigger the increase will be.