Why Consultants Must Use Email Marketing If They Want A Successful Business

Why Consultants Must Use Email Marketing If They Want A Successful Business

If you are a consultant and you want to run a profitable and successful business, you must use email marketing.

Why Consultants Muse Use Email Marketing If They Desire A Successful BusinessNot should, not could, but must.

In my opinion, if you do not use email marketing you will be missing countless opportunities to win new business.

There are several important reasons that you must use email marketing; here are the main ones:

  1. You sell a ‘might want, don’t need’ service
  2. Nobody buys your services from your website
  3. You get to prove your expertise over a prolonged period of time
  4. At the time your client eventually needs you it is easy to find your contact details.

Let’s look at these in turn, especially the first one which I am sure might have you scratching your head at the moment.

1. You sell a ‘might want, don’t need’ service

I fully understand this point as it completely applies to my marketing consultancy. I am big enough, old enough and some might say ugly enough to understand that no one wakes up in the morning and says to themselves “Right, today is the day I get myself a marketing consultant!” It just doesn’t happen; sadly.

I split businesses into two categories, which you need to understand for your own business as it determines the primary purpose of your business website.
If you are currently getting this wrong, understanding this point could transform your consultancy business, seriously.

Does your consultancy business provide relief for an ‘urgent itch’ or does it provide relief from a ‘mildly annoying rash’?

Let me give you some idea of what I mean here with an example.

An ‘urgent itch’ business would include a solicitor or lawyer. If I am moving house I am moving house now and need a solicitor to help me to do this. Or if I need to recover a debt I need to recover it now, so again my itch is urgent and I need help and advice immediately.
However, if we talk about my marketing consultancy, this definitely fits into the ‘mildly annoying rash’ category.

Let’s say that Bob is a Financial Adviser. He is aware that he does not have enough clients coming into his business at the moment. He is annoyed about this, so he starts to do some research around marketing to see if he can work out what he is missing and what he needs to do to fix the problem. He is sure that he can sort this problem out in time. The word ‘time’ is the key word here. He believes that in time he can sort this problem out, so he will do his research to find the solution.

Now, if I didn’t understand this point about marketing, I could make a serious mistake on my business website. You see, if whilst Bob is doing his research around the topic of marketing he stumbles across my website, if all I offered Bob from that website was a contact form and a telephone number for him to get in touch with me, he would come onto my website and leave it. I would have no way of keeping in touch with Bob and educating him on the topic of marketing because all I offered him was my contact details. Even if Bob had the best intentions and bookmarked my website because he liked what he said, he would never return. How many bookmarks does the average business owner have? Hundreds or thousands?

However, because I understand that my business services a ‘mildly annoying rash’, I know that it is vital that I offer Bob and other service business owners who come to my website the chance to download some information from it in exchange for his and their contact details. This way, I can help his research by showing him the most effective marketing methods for service business owners, but more importantly, because I use email marketing software to deliver my free guide, once he downloads the guide I can keep in touch with Bob on a regular basis until he is finally ready to ask for help.

Bearing in mind that my best marketing consultancy clients are on my email list for one or two years before they start working with me, can you see what I mean about how important it is to understand whether your business serves an itch or a rash?

If all that your website does is offer your telephone number and an enquiry form yet your business serves the rash, you will miss 90% of your potential clients and consequently will have a much smaller consultancy business.

However, if you now make the switch to offering a free (yet valuable) guide or training in exchange for their email address and then follow up every week forever, you will have a vastly more successful business.

Likewise, if you have been offering free information in exchange for contact details but your business serves that instant itch, changing to a strong call to action at the bottom of each page on your website telling your visitor how to get in touch with you today will also make a dramatic difference to your business.

However, nearly every consultant that I meet offers a ‘might want, don’t need’ service. Marketing consultants, process engineering consultants, business sale consultants, business continuity consultants; they are all ‘might want, don’t need’ services.

Point one, serving a ‘want don’t need’ business, check!

2. Nobody buys your services from your website

Following on from point one, I have already covered this, but just to reiterate; nobody will buy your ‘want, don’t need’ services from your website.

Where will they buy them from?

Your emails.

Get more prospects onto your email marketing list and keep in touch with them at least once a week, including a call to action at the bottom of each email, and you will soon have as many consultancy clients as you want and need.

3. You get to prove your expertise over a prolonged period of time

This point is so important. When you keep in touch with your prospects by sending them an email every week, you cannot fail to prove that you are an expert in your chosen consultancy subject matter.

Over a period of months or years, your prospect hears from you on a weekly basis with more tips and advice around your area of expertise.

When they finally get to the point that they are going to bite the bullet and take action to remove this itch, who are they going to contact?

Are they going to head back to Google, type in your service plus consultant and start the search from scratch, or are they going to contact this expert who has been emailing them every month for months or years now?

You know the answer.

4. At the time that your client eventually needs you it is easy to find your contact details.

Once they reach this point, it is easy for them to find your contact details because you are in their inbox every week.

Not only is this good for them, but if one of their business friends asks for an expert in your field, what do you think they will say and do?

“You need a marketing consultant you say Pete? Hang on a minute, yes I get an email from a marketing consultant every week. Let me dig out his contact details and send them over to you.”

Summary

If you run a consultancy business, as I said in the title of this article, you absolutely MUST use email marketing or you will leave thousands of pounds on the table.

If you are not yet using email marketing, or want to know how to use it better to grow your consultancy business, you should sign up for my free course below (see what I just did there?).

Free Training – Email Marketing Mastery. Click here now:>>

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