Email marketing isn’t an unfamiliar concept anymore — it’s been around long enough that it’s lost its air of mystery. And yet, we meet people almost every day who tell us that email marketing isn’t right for their business.
But if it’s essential that they keep in touch with their customers and want the opportunity to inform them of special offers, events, and all manner of news about their business, of course, the answer should be yes, right?
This response often has more to do with the fact that they don’t understand just how much email marketing can help their businesses. There is no shame in this. At iContact, we work with all types of clients who are specialists in their fields, and we don’t expect them to double as marketing experts. It’s our job to help them understand why email marketing will work for them without blinding them with science and distracting them from the main tasks of running their businesses.
The fact is, people are busy, and unless they can be presented with quick facts about how something like email will solve their everyday problems, they’ll always look towards “easier” solutions to promote their businesses.
Keep in mind that email marketing success is never guaranteed (any marketer who sells you a guaranteed marketing solution is undoubtedly a liar). Still, the risks (in terms of cost) are incredibly low, and results can easily be optimized with a little time and effort spent on each campaign. These email-resistant marketers often point to social media as a valid alternative to email marketing, and they are right to a certain extent. Social media provides an excellent opportunity for engaging “friends and followers” in conversation, but it does have its problems.
When social media isn’t your best bet
- Volume: The sheer volume of recommended social media posts means you’re fighting against a constant stream of competitive posts. The vast majority of these will be from friends and family sharing potentially poignant personal messages. How are you going to compete with that joyous birth announcement, those crazy pics from that wild night out, or those envy-inducing selfies from that exotic vacation with your blatant commercial message?
- Lifespan: Social media posts have a notoriously short lifespan. A Facebook post, for example, will see 75% of its views in the first 2.5 hours of its life. Twitter is even more precarious, with an average of only 18 minutes before each tweet is pushed out of view. Yes, people can search for your posts and tweets — but we all know seldom happens IRL.
- Algorithms: Social media companies are huge commercial enterprises. It’s not in their best interest to have your best interest in mind or promote your business for free. Algorithms will ensure your posts get the minimum amount of exposure — just enough to keep you interested and wanting more —but you’re going to have to pay for it.
- Money: When compared with other acquisition marketing channels, social media can appear to be a relatively inexpensive method of promoting your business. However, marketers should remember that there is no such thing as cheap or expensive marketing. There is only marketing that works and marketing that doesn’t work. Like paid search, social media can be an incredibly expensive route to market if it doesn’t deliver on its promises. Sure, you might only be spending $10 a day on your ads, but if they don’t convert, they are going to kill your margins. Social media companies are very good at persuading advertisers to spend a little bit more money to drive a little bit more traffic in the hope of selling a little bit more, and of course, many advertisers fall for it because it’s just so easy. In many cases, these advertisers are like gamblers trying to win back their loses with just one last bet.
- Strategy: Social media is easy. That’s why brands often assign this monotonous task to the office junior or intern. Yes, it’s incredibly easy to throw up a post on social media every couple of days (forgetting those precariously short lifespans), but if those posts aren’t aligned to your broader marketing objectives, they’re not going to have any significant impact on your business. There are two things to remember here: 1. Marketing is not easy. 2. Marketing should always have an objective.
- Environment: The name says it all. Social media is a social environment, and just like other social environments, think bars, cafes, restaurants, people don’t go there to be sold to (other than food and drink). They want to engage in conversations with their friends and family. But sadly, most businesses on social media are only interested in broadcasting their message and don’t have time to engage in conversations. It’s a bit like going into a restaurant and shouting that you’ve got something to sell and then sticking your fingers in your ears and expecting people to hand over money. Social media marketing can work, but you’ve got to invest some serious time and effort into it.
Email: The first social network
If you’re still reading this and unsure of which marketing effort deserves more budgeting, consider just how many years email has over social media. Arguably the first social media tool, emails can be shared with multiple people, and they are certainly not a one-way conversation (unless you send campaigns out from the rather naïve “no-reply” email address). If you ask me, email sounds pretty social.
And email, of course, has many advantages over social media. These include:
- Environment: The email inbox is, unlike social media, very much a place of work. An email remains visible in your subscriber’s inbox until they’ve engaged with it. It almost demands action (at least, that is its purpose). Are you one of those people who insist on getting your email inbox down to zero before the end of the week? If you are not, you almost certainly know somebody who does. Because email is a professional tool, it’s more likely to be engaged within a professional environment. Your subscribers will feel less conspicuous about engaging with an email marketing message at work than they will be sitting at their desks with their Facebook open.
- Access: Your subscribers can access your emails anywhere. The emails they view on their desktop at work can be easily reaccessed on their smartphones while commuting home, or on the tablet computer in the evening while watching TV. Unlike social media, they won’t disappear from view (after 24 hours in the case of Instagram Stories).
- CTAs: In the case of Facebook and Twitter, your social media posts will typically only have one call-to-action (CTA) in the form of a link to your website, and unless you pay extra, Instagram won’t even include a clickable link in your post. An email marketing campaign can have multiple links and CTAs, and while you probably don’t want to go crazy with your offers, this can be used in a highly effective manner by multiple types of business. For example, a travel agent might want to list a selection of vacation choices in their regular email campaigns. The really great thing about email is these various links can be analyzed so that individual subscribers can be targeted with more relevant campaigns in the future.
- Targeting: Targeted email marketing campaigns ensure that your subscribers will only see email marketing campaigns that are relevant to them. If they are constantly bombarded with a stream of irrelevant campaigns, they will likely disengage with marketing or, worse, become blind to your efforts. Email marketing is incredibly easy to personalize. When subscribers register with you, they give you all sorts of personal information. You can use this information to ensure that you get the right message to the right person at the right time. Even something as easy as addressing your subscriber by their first name can help you build your relationship with them.
- Cost: We’ve already said that there is no such thing as cheap marketing, so how should we describe a marketing technology that’s so keenly priced? Let’s put it this way: If we had a dollar every time we mentioned email marketing’s unmatched ROI, we’d be.. well, not here.
How to get started with email marketing
To start email marketing, you essentially need these five things:
- An Email Marketing Service Provider (ESP): ESPs like iContact provide the technology to create, manage, and send your email marketing campaigns. You can open an account with iContact incredibly easily — just go to www.icontact.com and register for our free 30-day trial. We won’t even ask you for a credit card.
- A Subscriber List: These are the email addresses that you’ll send your email marketing campaigns to. You must have permission from your email marketing subscribers to send them messages. As a general rule of thumb, when starting out, if you are not sure if you have permission or not — that almost certainly means you don’t. But don’t worry about this, iContact will give you all the tools you need, including forms to host on your website or blog and integrations with your eCommerce platforms or CRM systems to ensure your email lists grow the right way. Note: The most lucrative email address are nearly always the ones you collected most recently, so forget about those addresses you collected two or three years ago.
- An Email Template: Creating a beautiful email with iContact’s Drag & Drop Editor is incredibly easy. We have 100s of email templates (guaranteed to look great across multiple devices) that can be customized to suit your brand within a couple of clicks. Alternatively, you can upload your designs created by your in-house design team or call on the email marketing experts at iContact to build your bespoke email template.
- A Campaign Idea: This is your promotion. The best way to plan a campaign strategy is to take a careful look at what your objectives are. Do you want to drive traffic to your website, increase sales of a particular product or service, or simply share knowledge? Note: If you don’t set an objective for your email campaigns, you’ll never know if they’re successful or not.
- Support: We wouldn’t expect you to become an email marketing expert overnight, so we’ve invested heavily in providing all of our clients with all the support they need to start their journey and continuously optimize their sends. We don’t like to blow our trumpet too much – but we’re really good at supporting our clients and have won multiple awards for it.
What’s stopping you?
While every business is different, email marketing provides the perfect solution to build profitable relationships with your clients. Start email marketing today with iContact, and you’ll soon wonder why it took you soon long.
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