How on Earth do you grow an online business? And where does email marketing fit in?

This week on the show we talk about the 5 different things you need to do to grow your business.

So if you've got this awesome product or service, you put together an offer, you've been telling people about it, but you don't quite manage to sell as many as you thought you were going to sell, this will help you work out which piece of the puzzle you're missing. 

But there's a bit of a twist at the end…  

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: 
(1:03) What's the deal with Kennedy and tomatoes?
(3:12) Where does email fit it in your online business and why are things not working?
(5:21) Why you need a platform to grow your business. 
(8:21) How do you even pick your platform?
(8:50) Why you need to start email marketing. Yesterday. 
(12:30) Why a conversion mechanism is the third piece of the puzzle. 
(14:17) Have you thought about how you're going to deliver 'the thing'?
(16:45) The last piece of the puzzle - the resell phase.
(17:44) Why launch a referral affiliate scheme. (20:49) Subject line of the week. 

1. Choose a platform to grow your small business online

The first thing you're going to need to grow your online business is a platform. This is the place where you find people who could potentially buy from you, engage in your services, or hire you. 

Your platform is where people are gathering – where they find out about you. It could be your podcast, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, your Facebook group, an event, you being a guest speaker somewhere – you name it. 

But if you haven't got a platform yet (and you're not leveraging someone else's), then you don't have an audience who will buy your products or services. 

Take us, for example. We started things off with the podcast and then created a Facebook group that we linked back to the podcast. Now we're also on Twitter and various other channels. But like everyone, we had to start somewhere.

So where should you be? 

Whichever platform you pick for your business is up to you. None of them are better than any others. Just pick the platform that you work best with, get good at it, do it consistently, and build your audience there. Nothing works or doesn't work in and of itself – it's about what people do to make stuff work for them. 

2. Start doing email marketing

Email marketing is the next piece of the puzzle. Once you've grabbed your audience's attention, you want them to give your their email address and give you permission to get in touch more often. 

It's through email that you build a deeper connection with people. Plus, email is the highest return on investment marketing activity you can do as a business. You can sell more stuff with email than anything else you do. And there's no equivalent – unless you count the very expensive messenger bots or SMS marketing. Email marketing is simply more efficient, more effective, deeper, and more personal than any of the other business growth strategies you could ever think of employing. Fact. 

And let's not forget that email works in a two-way direction. Because you can move people from your original platform onto your email list, but you can also use your email list to send people to more platforms. We do that. People go from our podcast to our email list, and from there we send them to our Facebook group, for example. 

Another benefit of building an email list is that, unlike with other platforms, you own the data. If you want to switch email providers, you can just download your list and upload it elsewhere. You can also do clever stuff like segmentation, which pretty handy when you want to sell more of your stuff. 

3. Build a conversion mechanism to grow your business online presence

The third piece of the puzzle is your conversion mechanism. How do you actually make the sale? Do you get people on the phone or a Zoom call? Do you convert them from a webinar? Or maybe you send out a proposal? There are lots of different ways to convert. Often, we send people to a sales page with a cool video on it. 

But you've got to build this three-dimensional relationship with your audience where your email subscribers see you popping up on your Facebook, get to visit your sales page, or join a webinar you're hosting – whatever it might be, it's about having a strong conversion mechanism in place. 

4. Deliver your product or service and do it well

So now you've sold ‘the thing', you've got to deliver it, right? And no matter what you sell, you're probably going to deliver your product or service by email. You're going to email someone their login, or the details to book a call with you or send the email that says you've received their order, and their lovely product is now on its way. 

People want and need delivery to be done right. To be done well. Because we know it, and you know it – there's nothing more frustrating than submitting an order for anything and never getting a confirmation, or even worse, getting an error page and wondering whether you've just thrown your money down the drain. That's not cool. So think about how you deliver your thing. 

5. Focus on the re-sell to increase your online sales

And finally, the last piece of the puzzle is the re-sell phase. We all have to look at how we make more offers, supply more value, and ultimately make more sales from every single customer. If you sell a membership, how do you make your members stick around for years? If you sell an online course or one-off product, can you upsell or cross-sell something else? 

Another way to do this is by offering referrals. That's right – you can tell your customers how great they are and how you'd love to work with someone just like them. It's as easy as, “Hey, do you know somebody else who could do with my help?” You can even turn your customers into referral affiliate partners and pay them to send you more clients just like them. 

And guess what? You can do this by email too. In fact, you should! You can use email to grow your audience on more platforms, push them to your conversion mechanism, deliver your product or service, and even encourage them to buy more from you. 

We may have just given you 5 different elements, but they all have email marketing in common. Email marketing is the one thing that will help you grow your business!

Subject line of the week 

“Kennedy's to-do list. ?️”

That's it. 

It's *First Name*, followed by “to-do list”, followed by the pen emoji. And we used it for an email that had a list of things you should do to make your email marketing better. It got a massively high open rate and worked really well. 

Useful Episode Resources

Related episodes

The One Page Digital Marketing Funnel – Simplify To Monetise with Michael Greenberg.

Email Marketing for Small Businesses with Steffen Schebesta from SendInBlue.

Use Live Streaming to Build Your Email List with StreamYard’s Head of Marketing, Daniel Glickman.

FREE list of the top 10 books to improve your email marketing

Want to write better emails? Come up with better content? Influence and move your readers to click and buy? Well, you can do that with this list of our Top 10 most highly recommended books that will improve all areas of your email marketing (including some underground treasures that we happened upon, which have been game-changing for us). Grab your FREE list here. 

Join our FREE Facebook group

We know your business is different, so come and hang out in our FREE Facebook group, the Email Marketing Show Community for Course Creators and Coaches. We share a lot of training and resources, and you can talk about what you're up to.

Try ResponseSuite for $1

This week's episode is sponsored by ResponseSuite.com, the survey quiz and application form tool that we created specifically for small businesses like you to integrate with your marketing systems to segment your subscribers and make more sales. Try it out for 14 days for just $1.

Join The League Membership

Not sick of us yet? Every day we hang out in our amazing community of Email Marketing Heroes, where we get to share all of our training and campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff. If you're looking to learn how to use psychology-driven marketing to level up your email campaigns, come and check out The League Membership. It's the number one place to hang out and grow your email marketing by applying everything we talk about in this show.

Subscribe and review The Email Marketing Show podcast

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast! If you enjoyed this episode about how to grow your online business and love the show, we'd really appreciate you subscribing and leaving us a review of the show on your favourite podcast player.

Not only does it let us know you're out there listening, but your feedback helps us to keep creating the most useful episodes and get discovered by more awesome people like you.