008 - Businesses that aren't doing this one thing are falling behind.

Good morning, Asheville. Today is Wednesday, October 30th. Holy smokes. It's almost 60 degrees at the time of recording high low 70, 71. And I'm currently getting a 40% chance of rain, though when I click into that, the highest I see is about 5 or 10 or 15%. But it's over a long window of time. Maybe that's how they get 40%. Alas, I am not a meteorologist. What I am is a kind of marketer, sales guy, podcaster, and we're going to kind of stay in my lane. So today I want to talk about what I think is the biggest asset to local businesses. And you know, an asset that I feel might be getting overlooked on average on the whole. So that asset is email is an email list. And so as you know, marketer slash sales consultant, slash coach by day, I spend a lot of time subscribing to people's email lists and seeing what happens. And what I'll say is perhaps it's just where I'm sitting in the world and what I've seen so far. But what I'm seeing on the average business in and around Asheville, average business that's been affected by Helene, I'm seeing a tendency towards communicating via platforms that have algorithms. And what I'll what I want to flag is that the best way to communicate with customers, fans, supporters, investors is in a medium where there is no algorithm where your delivery rate, your hit rate nears 100%. And there are two known channels for delivering information to fans, followers and friends that have a near 100% delivery rate. And they are email and they are text message. And so worked with a lot of businesses over the years. Almost all have some level of ickiness, awkwardness and fear around over emailing. And what I'll argue is that that is a silly thing to feel so long as every message you send has a clear why if it can be close to valuable, whether it's you're telling new information, you're sending an update, you are sharing that a product is live sharing that a whatever. The fewer the individual updates or the per email, the fewer the calls to action per email, the more valuable each email is almost always sending massive updates with tens or fifteens or 20 different or even 4 different here's what you can do now is overwhelming and almost always gets no action. But an email that says, hey, I would love for you to buy a gift card from my business is really powerful. And so I want to flag that if you have an email list I would love to subscribe to it. And if you have an email list, I hope that you're sending emails right now. Meta cannot be the only source of communication to and with your customers, fans, followers, audience. So please, please, please, if you're not already, please, please, please send an email and then send more email than ever before. It will help your business in this time more than social media. And I can say that with a high level of confidence. Every business, if you haven't invested in growing or building or maintaining a high quality email list, now would be a really good time to begin that process. And I'm glad to be supportive as you think about what that plan might look like and how you might do that for your own business. But email list a number one, please don't trust that Meta has your best interests in Hart because they don't. Outside of that, the second best thing you can do is collaborate with other businesses. And I just want to shout out friend of the pod, a business Botanical Bones. Right? So Botanical Bones is running. She's calling it the Mountain Magic gift guide. I'm seeing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, maybe 16 businesses in a gift guide that she's created that she sent out on social. I believe I saw an email about it, Rachel. Did I see an email about it, Rachel? I hope I see an email about it. And what I like about this is that there's an opportunity when we send an email to our list to cross pollinate our audience with our friends, with our community's audiences in such a way that all of our email lists grow with people who are enthusiastic in supporting what it is that we're doing, building, growing. And I think that this is about the biggest gift you can give to a friend, community, business owner is a bump from your email list into theirs. There are tools you can use that allow for people when they click a link from your email to effectively have raised their hand and say, yeah, put me on the other person's email list via a little click. You export a CSV file, they upload the CSV file and now everyone wins. I think that this might be one of the strongest ways that businesses can collaborate with each other through the end of this year and into next year. Like this strategy is never a bad strategy when it comes to creating a vibrant ecosystem. We need cross pollination. So I want to flag emails and emails with friends is a really, really strong business strategy right now that I feel that I'm not seeing enough of Next week Ideally I'm going to talk to you and potentially have a guest on that's going to talk about what might be even a level further than this, which is really exciting. But I don't want to over speak or make it up. So we'll wait for more on that next week. Essence of this conversation of this episode is that if you are a business owner or you have a friend in town that owns a business, flag this conversation, send them this episode, send them this video and say, hey, this guy named Tony says that right now is the time to be sending emails to people and I'm glad to help on thinking through what those emails might say and how they might look. They do not need to be majorly designed, they just need to go out so that people know that you exist and know what you want them to do. So with that, send me some emails@helloakingitinasheville. Comment on these posts and the channels that you see it like subscribe all that stuff and until next time, please take care and be good to people.