Credibility is the fundamental word – Talk Marketing 044 – Nathan Littleton

Nathan has 18 years marketing experience but that is only because he started when he was 12.

So what innovate, exciting, new marketing initiative is this young blood going to teach us about?

The surprising answer is email marketing.

If you are 12 and you are thinking about getting started in business, or if you are older and you are wondering if email marketing might be good for your business – you should find this one interesting 🙂

Martin Henley
How are you qualified to talk to us about email marketing?

Nathan Littleton
Well, I’m a big believer in practice over theory, and I send more than a million emails each and every year. I get first hand experience of exactly how that works. In fact, that’s nearing 2 million emails each and every year, because I work with a number of clients where I manage the email campaigns for them. I get to see what works, I get to try subject lines and see what a difference it makes the open rate, I get to try different copy and experiment with things and see what really makes a difference when it comes to either a sales campaign or a newsletter campaign that is going to work for my clients. So by sending that many emails a year, I get the chance to be able to do that. And hey, I’ve been sending emails for 11 or 12 years now in a formal sense with email marketing. So yeah, I know what works, I’ve seen what’s changed. I’ve also seen how it stacks up against other marketing mediums. So we were talking a little bit about that earlier. I just think, if I look back to five or six years ago, when people put so much effort, so much energy, and in fact, in some cases, quite a bit of money into building, let’s say, Facebook fan pages, you built up the likes there, you had, let’s say, 1000, or 2000 fans, and the idea there was that you were building an audience that you could communicate with. Fast forward two or three years, and then Facebook, move the goalposts and decide that, hey, your message can’t get in front of those people unless you pay for the ads. So your entire marketing strategy there through that one medium is dependent on one corporation. The same applies when it comes to other forms of paid advertising other things where it’s one business that controls it, it’s one platform. The advantage I think you have with email marketing is that it should be pretty safe for a number of years to come. Yes, there are things that comes in like GDPR and there might be something else in the future but that’s a societal change, that’s a political change, that isn’t going to impact what you’re doing just because one company changes what it wants based on how it’s going to drive its own revenue. So I’m a big believer that you should be operating in your own playground rather than somebody else’s. And email marketing is a great way to do that.

Martin Henley
Wow, genius, it’s completely true. I was one of those Muppets, between 2007 probably till I stopped running Effective Marketing properly, maybe 2014, where I was saying to people if you’re doing Facebook advertising pay for people to be fans of your page, because what you’re buying is the opportunity to talk to those people forever. Then literally, like you say, like the gates closed, Facebook decided they wanted money for that and I think that’s fraud. I say this to my groups, I teach digital marketing, so when we talk about social media I say this to people, because they sold for whatever it was those four or five years, the opportunity to speak to these people and then they sold it again.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?