Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are excellent ways to keep in touch and engage with your customers. However, because of their success many people claim that email marketing is dead and no longer relevant.
Don’t listen to them, as nothing could be further away from the truth.
Email marketing is alive and well and is still one of the most powerful and effective methods of online marketing and for keeping in touch with your customers.
What is email marketing?
So let’s look at what email marketing is and why it is so effective in business?
Email marketing is when a visitor comes to your website and subscribes to your mailing list or other offer you make to them. Often this will be an e-book, white paper, data sheet, webinar opt-in or free 30 minute consultation enquiry. However you catch their attention it is important to then gain their permission to keep in touch with them via email. Having a contact list such as this is essential if you are selling a product or service. Email marketing allows you to establish customer loyalty, trust and brand awareness, and encourages your subscribers to buy from you more often.
Obviously it has many benefits. It is a powerful marketing tool but unfortunately, email marketing seems to have a bad reputation with some businesses, who don’t fully understand it.
Some companies think if people see an email that isn’t from someone they know, they will immediately consider it spam and delete it, and then think badly about their business.
While this may be true in some cases, (mainly because companies haven’t taken the time to nurture their list), with responsible marketing you can make email marketing campaigns work extremely well for your business.
Email marketing versus social media marketing
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are excellent ways to engage with both potential and existing clients. They are perfect platforms for word of mouth advertising, strengthening the relationship with your existing audience and putting you in front of a brand new audience.
Both of these things are essential to your business. However, you don’t have much control over who sees your updates or even when they see them.
Not only that, but you are not fully in control of these connections, as Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are constantly making changes without warning that could impact the way you connect with your followers.
Social media is important but it doesn’t give you the ability to contact people one-on-one the way you can with emails. With email marketing you are able to fine tune your promotional campaigns and build a list of people who are actually interested in what you have to offer.
With Twitter for example, your message is competing with hundreds or even thousands of other Tweets from companies promoting similar products or services to yours. The same is true on Facebook.
Even if you have thousands of fans, they probably follow lots of other pages as well, which dilutes your message. Yes, the same can be said about emails but if you send a personalised email and they open and read the email you will have their undivided attention even if it is just for a few minutes. There are too many distractions on social networks with chat options, latest status updates, new photos to see and so on.
That is why it is so important to try and convert your followers to your email marketing list as early as you can. Once you do, it puts you in full control because they are now YOUR contacts. The only way you will lose them is if they decide to unsubscribe from your list.
If you feel marketing your business is a scary prospect with a minefield of options, then we can hold you by the hand and take you through the process of achieving what you set out to.
By working in partnership with Jumpworks we can help you accelerate the growth of your business and increase the return on the digital marketing you do.
If you would like to get started then please feel free to give us a call or pop an email over to us – we don’t bite we promise and we will be happy to help you in any way we can.
