Marketing Help For Coaches

If your e-mail inbox was anything like mine last week, you'll have been bombarded with bulk e-mailed Happy New Year messages and New Year Newsletters.

You've got to credit people with getting in early, especially the coaches who led with a New Year's Resolution message. However if you're one of them, you might have experienced a lower than usual open and click through rate on your emails.

Last week I talked about the importance of bucking the trend and doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing. Some of you have already emailed me to say that after reading last week's tip you've managed to set up lunch and coffee meetings with contacts and prospective clients, so bucking the trend works.

Sending a New Year's Resolution/Goal Setting message as close as possible to 1st January seems like the obvious thing to do, doesn't it?

When everybody is doing the same type of Marketing at the same time, it creates clutter and most people strive to reduce the amount of clutter in their lives. Forgive me if you think I'm stating the obvious, but let's look at a few points that may have impacted on any bulk emails sent out over the last few days:

• Even if you were checking your emails and clearing out your unwanted messages over Christmas and New Year, the chances are that your prospective clients weren't. When they did check their emails, they will have had lots of Happy Christmas and Happy New Year messages to go through, in addition to any spam messages or regular emails.
• A significant number of people only came back to work on Monday this week. This means that they typically had hundreds of messages to go through on their return. Remember that many people access even their personal emails from their computer at work.
• If people have an interest in coaching or personal development, they may have subscribed to multiple lists, i.e. not just yours. Even when people have opted-in to receive your newsletter and announcements, when they have several messages to go through, they'll either skim-read or hit 'delete' without opening it – especially if they perceive it to be similar to something else they've read from someone else.

So, what can you do?

Firstly, buck the trend and time your newsletters to go out AFTER most people will have cleared their inboxes of messages. In the same way that you probably wouldn't call a contact on their first day back from annual leave to pitch your services to them, wait a day or two to let them clear out their clutter.

Secondly, make sure that the content of your newsletters contains information that is different from the messages and articles that other people might send out. Do you have a quirky perspective on things?

Finally, look at the subject line and write something that sparks people's interest. A newsletter with the subject line 'Happy New Year' is unlikely to see a high level of opens and click-throughs.

Now, it may be that you're reading this article and wondering how you find out what your 'open' and 'click-through' rates are.

There are several newsletter packages out there which allow you to track how many people open your email and then how many click through on a link that you've contained in the email. These same packages will manage sign-ups and any unsubscribe requests automatically.

The one that I use and personally recommend is aweber.com. You can get a free trial of their services from their website.