I ran into this article on a forum today. In an article entitled “Woo-hoo! Got my first offline client with no face-to-face meeting and no cold-calling…” , Nail Yener talks about how he was able to get offline business using email. Naturally, this anything that doesn’t require cold-calling is of great interest to me. Email offline marketing ideas are a good way to turn your leads into customers using email.
Here’s what Yener had to say:
About two months ago, I had absolutely no interest or intention to do anything related to the offline part of internet marketing. I was making money with various online methods like CPA, AdSense, Amazon etc. and I was thinking I would never get involved in the offline world…
…until a friend of mine mentioned about mobile. Honestly, I had no idea about what was going on in the mobile world till that time. Then I came to WF looking for all the threads about mobile. Soon I found this thread which was talking about selling mobile friendly websites to local businesses. After going over a few pages, I realized that this was something I would really like to do: designing and selling mobile friendly websites.
Although I was not a designer type of guy, I decided to give it a try since I was so excited about designing mobile friendly sites and I believed that this is something almost all businesses will need. In the next weeks I searched and consumed all the available information on this forum and on the internet about mobile web design. I learned a lot in a short time and created my first sample mobile sites and finally a free mobile site to a hotel in my country.
Meanwhile I started to contact business owners via email to offer mobile friendly websites. I targeted businesses in other countries because in my city, business owners wouldn’t be interested in mobile sites at this time therefore face-to-face meetings wouldn’t work for me. Also, cold-calling is not my type that’s why I went with email.
Since I was new to offline world and email marketing, it took hundreds of emails for me to fine tune my email campaign and finally get some positive response. I started with hard sales pitches and from the responses I got, I noticed that the way my emails sounded perfect to me was not a perfect read for the business owners. And I modified my email every time I got a response in order to improve it. Additionally, I prepared a six-page report about the benefits of mobile friendly websites to educate interested business owners.
I came back to WF to find some email marketing advice and blended all the advice I could get, to create my unique email. Honestly, there are more than enough free advice on this forum that I didn’t have to buy a WSO. There are a lot of warriors that give great advice about how to compose a well performing email on different threads and I followed their advice.
Two days ago, I created the 8th version of my email which has been perfected in the previous versions and I started to send that one to businesses. And yesterday I started talking with an interested business owner from another country which I was able to close the deal on my third email today. And now, I will do my best to make my first offline client the happiest offline client ever
So, what did I have in the opening email?
It is the first email that will determine success or failure in email marketing and if you can get the desired response in the first email than you will have a good chance of converting that person into a client. And my desired response was to get their attention in a positive manner so that when I send them my second email, the main one, they will read it and reply even if they are not interested.
I will not give the exact copy of my emails because I really don’t want another person to use my exact words to contact business owners, and maybe to the ones that I already contacted, because this will reduce my and that person’s credibility to 0 instantly. Though I will give some ideas about them.
Just before that, here are a couple of things that I learned about emails on WF.
Do not expect a high response rate as you will never get it whatever you say in your email.
Never let your first email smell like as if it is coming from a marketer.
Don’t try to sell them anything at the first contact, try to take them into a conversation.
Offer something valuable to them for free to build instant credibility. An SEO analysis, a video, a report, a free backlink, etc.
Follow can-spam act rules.In the first/opening email I asked a question about their business. A really simple question and this can be varied in dozens of ways like:
“which cities do you serve?”,
“do you offer this and that as well?”,
“are you open on Sundays”,
“I heard that you have a great …, is this correct?”,
“can you help me better understand this about your product/service?”,
“do you offer coupons/discounts?”,
…No lies, no tricks; just simple questions. Such an email will certainly get some positive response from business owners who check their emails and this is actually what we want.
Then, in my second email, after getting their positive response I kindly mentioned that their website didn’t have a mobile friendly version and not mentioning that I can design a mobile site for them, I simply added my six-page report which talks about the latest mobile trends/statistics and the benefits of mobile sites with a closing paragraph mentioning that I could help them.
And that’s how I got my first offline client without any face-to-face meeting or cold-calling. I believe my system still needs improvements and I will be modifying it as I keep getting responses. But that first client proved me one thing:
You can get offline clients by email only. It just takes a lot of effort and fine-tuning.
The best part about using the internet to market your offline business is that there are many users and plenty of free information on forums and the like. Marketing your business to other businesses using email sounds simple enough but it will require some effort on your part. It will be important to ask the business meaningful questions and to read through their responses. In doing so, you will build rapport and that business will be much more apt to like you, trust you and cooperate with you. Especially if you respond to their email responses with helpful tips and useful, pertinent information.
