So let's have a look at email marketing, we're going to discuss the importance of owning your list. We're going to look at permission based marketing, we're going to look at transactional value. And we're also going to look at it relative success. So let's talk about owning your list. A few years ago, I'm going to give you an analogy to help you understand the importance of this. Everyone was getting really excited about facebook, facebook was saying you need a business page, get on Facebook, do your marketing on Facebook, get a business page.

What would happen every time someone signed up to Facebook, you will build Facebook's list not your own. But what happened was really interesting, because you would share a post on Facebook and the people that have said they will follow you and they wanted your content will get shown your post and then Facebook decided to take that and reduce that all of a sudden it was 20% and then they moved it to 10% now 5% and 2% and 1% What that means is this nowadays, if 100 people have followed you, and you share a post on your business page on Facebook, one person is going to be shown that post unless you pay for it. Now, that was a really interesting lesson because a lot of people invested in Facebook, and then they had to pay to access the people that have said they wanted to act, and they built on someone else's land, they didn't own the land, they built the house.

So one of the really important parts of online marketing and online marketing business is that we should own the list, we should own our list. And we have to understand the value of our list. It's the single biggest resource we can build in terms of marketing online, it is what's going to drive a lot of the profit in the business. It's going to drive a lot of engagement, a lot of the interaction with people, so it's really, really important. we own our own list. And that just essentially means that our list people have signed up to our list.

And we own that data we have that data. Now, what we're going to be talking about here is permission based marketing. So what does that mean? That means we've got permission to be useful. We have permission to access a potential client inbox. And we have permission to market we have been granted some really interesting permissions by the potential contact the potential client.

First of all, we have only been given permission to be useful. So our email marketing must always have at the core at the foundation of everything it delivers usefulness. That is why they've signed up. They have said, as long as you're useful, you have permission to send me email. And the other thing they've said is you have permission to access my inbox. And we have to understand that we're going to look at that a little bit more transactional value.

But they've basically said, I am giving you permission to put your messages in my inbox and people are very, very protective of their inboxes. Think about your own inbox. And when you get unwanted email, what do you do with it, you get rid of it, when someone gives you permission to access their inbox, we have to respect that. And we have to make sure we keep delivering useful value and useful content in our in our emails, and everything they've given us permission to market. Now, this is the one that least aware of, but they have actually, in effect said I am giving you permission to market to me and we can discuss how we do that within the context of being useful within the context of respect in their inbox. And the key thing here is, we have been given permission.

This is why we don't buy lists. We don't take contracts from another place and add them to our list. Everyone who signs up has to be someone who's given you permission to do what you're doing. And it's a really fundamental important point. We also need to have a look at transaction value. So email signups when someone signs up to your list, it's a transaction.

You're saying, I'm going to give you something of value and an exchange, I want your email. I want permission to market to you. There has to be enough of value in the transaction that someone is willing to give you their email. And the way we do that we're going to discuss later on is we we give them some free content, we give them something of high value And then they're gonna sign up. So when they sign up to an email, it's not something they enter in as if it's something that's free for them to do. There is a transaction value in there protecting that inbox, as we mentioned earlier.

So we have to focus on high enough value. Now, the only thing we need to touch on here when it comes to this is so much value that some of our really clever newsletter subscribers will set up a a throwaway account so they can get access to your content. So set up a free gmail account, or a free Yahoo account, something like that, or some type of free email so that you don't get their real email. So we have to accept that's going to happen. But there's still going to be checking that email address. So we still have access.

But that is something we have to be aware of when we're doing transactional value. But we have to Make sure that the value is really high. And if we make it high enough, they will sign up a lot of the time with their main email address, if they've got any doubts, they want the content, maybe offering a PDF, or maybe you're offering some type of content is free or a really special deal or discount, they're gonna give you a dummy email, if they're not fully convinced about the value of the transaction, even if they are some people are very clever about their email and they'll protect their inbox. So these are some things we need to be thinking about. As we go through the process of building our email marketing. Email Marketing, success is iterative, it it takes time, it takes tweaking, we must understand that because we can be impatient sometimes with our marketing, you know, especially if we're trying to pay the bills or we're trying to bring work in we're trying to bring revenue in and we have to understand that a good email marketing list and a good email marketing strategy is a long term prospect.

If you start building now, you will see value. It could be as little as a couple of weeks, it could be as little as a couple of months, it could be an 18 month. But the thing we're going to have to understand is it takes time to build, and we're going to have to improve, we're going to have to tweak we're going to have to test all the time, we're going to have to look at what's working and what isn't, and keep moving towards that email marketing strategy that really reaches our core audience, and really helps them because when we can figure that out, when we can fine tune it when we can get it just right. That's when it will really start working for us. So this isn't a race. This is a case of the hare and the tortoise and this is the tortoise always wins this race, the hare never win.

So as we go Through this, you're thinking about building up over time and the long term commitment to good email marketing