Hi it’s me, Jon. I’m still in Spain at mom and dad’s house. I’m sitting here on the deck of mom and dad’s apartment, looking over the golf course that we live next to. By the time you watch this, I’ll be back in Australia and sleeping because I’ll be tired after my 40-hour journey.

Is email marketing effective for trades businesses?

Today’s topic is ‘Sh*tty Email Marketing’ (Don’t do this!) or even, ‘Email Marketing for trades businesses — and how you should do it’.

I get these emails in my inbox every now and then, and I’m sure you do get them as well.

Sometimes, I get them from LinkedIn, sometimes I get an email:

“Hi Jon, I’ve seen your profile”.

“Hi Jon, thanks for connecting”.

“Hi Jon, I’ve looked at your website, let me tell you about my amazing thing you might want to buy. You should buy it, or you should come to my website, or you should come to my workshop, or you should come to my webinar”.

And it’s just a straightforward, “I’ve never met you before, here’s my thing”.

And that’s fine. I don’t really mind being marketed to. We all market, I market.  I reach out to people and say, “I’m a business coach,  join and look at that”, so fair enough.

It’s the next thing that’s irritating.

After a couple of days what happens is, I get an email saying, “Oh, Jon, you haven’t responded. I sent you an email explaining how amazing I am and you didn’t respond.”

And I think “You can get f*cked, can’t you? Because I didn’t respond to you, stupid spam.”

If I was interested, I would have responded and I wasn’t interested so I didn’t. I’m a bit cross now. I’m a bit irritated, and I think that’s a slightly irritating approach.

It gets worse though, (doesn’t it?) when you get to the third one that says, “Hi Jon, you haven’t responded to both my emails and now I’m going to assume that you’re not interested in my thing. And if you were interested, you really should get in touch.” And I think you can f*ck right off.

I understand it’s just marketing. I understand it’s automated, and I have to pull myself in my irritation. I’m going to get the emails and go, ‘It’s just bullsh*t. I should ignore it,’ and I do.

But here’s the thing for you, don’t do that sh*t.

• It’s rubbish marketing
• It’s rude marketing
• It’s sh*t marketing

Apparently, it works. People seem to think it works but don’t do it!

Email is not a good way to start a relationship. It’s a great way to maintain a relationship but spammers are people who send unsolicited emails and everyone hates spammers, don’t they?

Email is good for maintaining a relationship with your customers or your potential customers. If someone’s come to you or your website giving you their email address and expressed some interest in what you do, then it’s a great thing to do.

For a trade business, email has a limited application. Let’s not get too excited about email. Email is good when people want to read your emails or watch your videos. It’s for when you’ve got stuff to say that’s interesting, or useful to your customers.

For my business, business coach for tradies, email is a bit useful because the service I’m selling, business coaching for trades business owners, is about teaching you stuff that you want to learn: marketing, and sales, and how to grow and scale your business.

But that’s not true so much for a trade business. Your customers don’t want to learn ‘how to install the toilet’, ‘how to build a fence’. They don’t want to learn that, you do it for them. You’re there to do it, not to teach them. Teaching them sh*t on emails is not very interesting and frankly, emails from a trade business aren’t that interesting. And if you spend your energy and your money sending emails to your customers, teaching them trade stuff, you’re missing the mark. They won’t read them, they won’t be interested, they won’t open them, and you won’t get the benefit that you want.

The benefit you want in terms of relationship marketing is to say to your customers, “We’re here, next time you need a carpenter, plumber, electrician, etc think of us”. And if they don’t open your emails, it’s because they’re not very interesting so you lose that benefit.

When to use email marketing

I think you’re wasting your money and I think you’d be better to spend your money somewhere else, instead.

Now, where else to spend it isn’t the topic of this video. If you watch my other videos, you’ll see where I think you should spend your money.

Recommended Reading: How To Spend Your Marketing Money For Your Trades Business

And of course, if you join the program, I’ll show you very clearly where I think you should be spending your marketing money.

Frankly, pictures of someone else’s fence or pool or house isn’t that interesting unless you’re on the market for a fence or a pool or a house. And of course, there is an exception to this.

If your customer is on the market for a builder, pool builder, fencer, etc then what you do and why you’re good is an interest to them.

I call this ‘short-term relationship marketing’. If they’ve come to your site, and they’ve downloaded a free ‘how to choose a builder’  download, then send them an email every week telling them how good you are, and why you’re useful and how useful you can be to them in their project. That’s very interesting to them because they’re interested in buying that stuff now.

So, short-term relationship email marketing is very important and if you think that’s right for you (it’s right for project-based trades businesses selling to consumers), you should be doing that. If you think that might be right for you, get in touch, I’ll talk to you in more detail.

But apart from that, I think email marketing might not be where you should focus your money and your time.

Now, I’ve talked to digital marketers who specialise with trades business, and I’m always investigating new things and listening to them, and some of them think email marketing might be right. So, I’m investigating whether they might be right and I might be mistaken. And if they are, they can persuade me with actual figures rather than just  “I think it should be like this”, then I’ll change my mind. I’ll change my advice to you.

For now, I don’t think you should spend your money on email marketing unless it’s short-term relationship marketing for people who want a builder, pool builder, fence builder, etc and might buy in the next two or three months.