Productivity Training Meets Email Marketing - iContact
- Updated on: 2017-06-20
- Read original article here
For productivity speaker, coach, and small business owner, Lori Bruhns, it’s all about maintaining an excellent work/life fit for her clients — and for herself. A one-woman business dynamo, she uses iContact email marketing to develop important channels of communication with her customers and to keep her company on track with growth goals.
A self-styled “solopreneur,” Bruhns travels throughout North Carolina and the U.S. offering training to individuals, businesses, and organizations on how to achieve more and find greater personal satisfaction while they do so. Organizations like Duke University Medical Center and businesses like SAS hire Bruhns to provide productivity training tailored to fit the needs and style of their staff. Bruhns also coaches entrepreneurs how to attain financial success, and individuals on ways to maximize their time and talent to meet financial goals and increase personal productivity.
Bruhns’ impetus in starting her business was a personal need for that same work/life fit she helps her clients work toward. After 8+ years of teaching middle school Spanish, Bruhns needed to move forward in a different direction: “I started my SMB after I had twins boys and wanted to have flexibility in my job to be with my children and have a career,” she recalls. “I used my formal training as an educator and incorporated it in my SMB. I was fueling my passion for educating others, while remaining accessible to my family.” Marketing automation saves time and increases productivity. See for yourself. Try iContact Pro, FREE for 30 days, and put automation to work. One of Bruhns’ goals is to help her clients reach higher levels of achievement, while carving out more time to enjoy life on a personal level. And she knows that can be a real challenge.
“I don’t believe in work/life balance but rather work/life ebb and flow. To me that is a more realistic approach to how 99.99% of most people’s lives are. We are constantly moving with the waves of our lives. Sometimes the tide of our lives is in and the water is deep, sometimes the tide is out and we can see our toes in the sand,” says Bruhns. “No matter where the tide of our lives is, we are moving around in it the best we can. The biggest challenge is knowing what to do depending on that life tide.”
Maintaining excellent communications with both clients and prospects is key to the success of Bruhns’ business: “Email marketing is a way to have my clients and attendees to my presentations have more of my expertise. I love educating others and email marketing is the best way to ‘feed’ information to others,” says Bruhns. “My emails are part motivation and part information, just like my presentations and one-on-one coaching sessions. I am of the mindset you can never stop consuming information, and email marketing is a way for me to reach a large audience.”
When it came time to pick an email service provider, Bruhns is clear about what made iContact stand out: “I chose iContact for its AWESOME customer support,” she says. “I am pretty tech savvy (if I do say so myself), but there are times I just need to confirm my instincts on what I am doing or be sure if it’s the most efficient and effective way to do it. With iContact’s customer support team, I am rocking it!”
iContact Customer Care Manager and onboarding specialist, Bill Stephenson, has been working closely with Bruhns to get her email marketing strategy running smoothly. “Bill is AWESOME. We connect about once a month to review, revise, and resend. He helps me set realistic goals and helps me achieve them,” says Bruhns.
It’s a successful working relationship on both sides. “Lori is a wonderful client to work with. She has an infectious energy that brings you into her world and challenges both of us to find ways to improve her business and make it grow,” says Stephenson. “We connected immediately and the synergy was amazing. She is always willing to expand her horizons, and explore what is beyond. She works with the motto: ‘Won’t know if you don’t try.’”
Like many of iContact’s small business customers, Bruhns has to multi-task and wear many hats when it comes to running a successful business: “It’s just me, myself and I. I am the marketing and social media department,” emphasizes Bruhns. “When my readers get my emails it is me doing the writing, it’s my personal experiences coming through, and it’s my intellectual property they are getting. iContact is my support system to make sure my message is getting out there loud and clear.”
Bruhns has been maintaining a weekly email send schedule and is now ramping up to twice a week sending. She doesn’t get many unsubscribes: “I spend a lot of time thinking about what my clients want to see and what they want to hear. I treat people on my list they way I like to be treated on someone else’s mailing list — I don’t like to be sold to every five minutes. Teach me, let me learn and when I’m ready to buy, I will. I respect that with my own clients.”
As a fairly new business, Bruhns has concentrated on building her email list and her reach. At each speaking engagement or conference, she collects email names to add to her list, being very clear about what subscribers will get in return. She doesn’t want to be too sales-y: “I want to be sure that my potential customers can trust me, before I try to sell them anything,” says Bruhns. “They know they will get weekly tips building upon the presentation they just attended. I provide them more with content and positive info, rather than just a ‘Buy, Buy, Buy’ message.”
Although Bruhns has been an iContact customer for only a few months, she already has seen a positive impact from email marketing on her business growth: “Email is having a tangible impact in a few ways. Since it helps get my message out there to the right audience, I have had people call to hire me for speaking engagements; they also share my messages with others, and through that, I am able to establish myself as an expert on various platforms,” acknowledges Bruhns. “Overall, email marketing keeps me visible beyond my town and the state of North Carolina. Through email marketing, people are getting to know, like, and trust me – which helps my business grow.”
Going forward, Bruhns has definite goals for continued improvement, including increasing her open rates, getting more shares, and keeping her unsubscribes low. “I also want to dig deeper into learning all the awesome tools iContact has to offer,” she says. “As I said before, Bill helps me set new monthly goals that are attainable and easily implementable. Sort of like building a house one brick at a time.” She is currently working on putting a landing page on her website and expanding her audience beyond the U.S. to an international level. “With the technology available today, the ocean isn’t that large anymore.”
When it comes to using email marketing to grow a successful small business, Bruhns has good advice for other SMB entrepreneurs: “Better done, than perfect. Don’t wait to have a perfect email campaign to start sending out your message!” advises Bruhns. “Start with what you have and where you are, and then build from there. iContact has so many ways to support its customers, but the first step has to be taken by you. Once you take that step, iContact’s support team can help you climb to where you need to go.”
To learn more about productivity-speaking and coaching, visit Lori Bruhns’ website and subscribe to her newsletter filled with time management and productivity tips. You can also follow the social media savvy Bruhns on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or connect with her on LinkedIn.
Do you have a small business email marketing success story? Let us know in the comments below; we’d love to share it on our blog.
