Good morning. Just joined up, and thought I’d post the obligatory intro
I’m John Snippe, COO of H2Only Inc., a bottled water delivery company located in St Catharines, ON. We’ve been in business since 1994, and in that time I have learned a great deal about the internet (was a webdev for a while, and a software tester for Adobe’s foray into Cyber Studio)… but somehow I COMPLETELY missed the train on digital marketing.
Then Ryan Deiss did to me what Ryan Deiss does, and I signed up at DigitalMarketer.com not quite two months ago. Started learning and catching up. Oh my. SO much to learn! And me with hardening of the arteries and all (I’m supposed to be retired…)
My set-up is a home-rolled website (PHP/includes static). Very basic. Beside this I have recently installed Wordpress (with which I am familiar: I have used it in the past, and admin’ed for others), for which I have bought into the Thrive ecosphere (subscription - got it all).
After a brief false start at Drip, and after the choir at DigitalMarketing sang “AC! AC! AC!” to me (and everyone who asks, actually… the population there is pretty unanimous) I signed on here. Oh… and I tried Mailchimp (shudder). Loving AC… it makes sense to me, and by-and-large I think it will work perfectly (even overkill) for what I am attempting to achieve.
So that’s me and my setup at the moment. Looking forward to becoming a one-sku (<- yep) digital marketing marvel!
We are currently looking at two prongs:
1: we have a database with some 7K contacts we’ve accumulated via networking, doorknocking, and association affilliations. My first job will be to ‘re-engage’ those contacts. A bit nervous about this: suspect it might hurt my rep, so I will be doing it slow and careful, with an eye on the stats. The re-engagement process offers three choices (over the course of 21 days and 4 emails is the current plan… still building it out):
subscribe to main channel
Subscribe to newsletter (which I will host locally on a listserv)
Unsubscribe, either by contact choice, or by automation if no choices have been made by the end of the process
2: client acquisition via organic/paid traffic (Blog and FB, to start) into an infomercial (not sure if that’s the right term, but I’ll run with it) news updates / sales funnel multiple-campaign scenario.
BTW: It is interesting to be digimarketing H2Only. We are highly analogue (large-format bottled water doesn’t translate well in digital sales… FedEx doesn’t deliver!), and we also are dealing with a highly proscribed geographical area (a +/-50-mile range) and population (500K)… so our marketing efforts will need to be tightly controlled. That’s a plus and a minus, of course… and the learn difficulty is compounded for me by the fact that all the examples are indeed digital (online products, sales and services, or at least easily shippable.)
Fortunately, we don’t need this initiative: it is ancillary to our core process, for now. If it works the way I hope and expect it to, tho, I suspect the boss will be very pleased, and may even join me in “retirement”
