5-4-3-2-1 You Need Email Marketing
Email seems to be somewhat of a red-headed step child of online marketing. While it doesn’t get much attention, email remains the best channel for engaging with your target audience.
Facebook is an important marketing tool for your business, but when you’re looking for the most direct way to reach and interact with your audience, it’s best to turn to email. Allow me to convince you in a quick countdown:
5 Facts
Here are just five data points that illustrate the impact of email marketing.
- Email is used by 3 billion people. If you’re doing business in the developed world, your customers are actively using email.
- For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $38.
- According to Forrester, people are twice as likely to sign up for your email list as they are to interact with you on Facebook.
- Email has a higher conversion rate than social media and search COMBINED.
- 72 percent of consumers prefer email as their source of business communication.
4 List Building Strategies
Core to email marketing is building a list of contacts to reach. Here are four great ways to build you list.
- Blog – When you blog anywhere, end with a call to action to sign up for your email list (where you will, of course, share more great content!)
- LinkedIn and other social media– Post content that points people to your email list. Use your own posts and comment on relevant posts by others. (“The answer to your question is x, and to get more insights on this topic, sign up for me email list.”)
- Website – Your website is the home base for your online presence. It is the place you should drive anyone who engages with your content. Make sure when people arrive, they are invited to sign up for your email list.
- Enewsletter – If you use your list to send an enewlsetter (and you should), encourage people to share the newsletter. Be sure there is a link to sign up to get the newsletter in the newsletter, so people who see it via this kind of sharing can add themselves to your list.
3 Tools
There are excellent tools out there that make it easy to maintain your list and send messages. In fact, DON’T email marketing without one of these tools or one like them. They keep you on the right side of CAN-SPAM and other laws and practices that can shut down your efforts.
- Constant Contact
- MailChimp (my personal favorite.)
- Robly
2 Things to Keep in Mind
- Quality supersedes volume. Only leverage your email list when you have something to say that is valuable .
- 80/20 rule of information versus direct promotion: keep this proportion in your messaging.
1 Resource to Help You Succeed
Subscribe to my email list! (C’mon, you had to see that one coming!)
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