By Ericka Simpson
Email marketing is a must if you want to deepen customer relationships.Source Digit says that globally more than 182 billion emails were sent every day in 2014. Texting and social media aside, people still place a lot of value in email.
You could rely on social media to connect with prospects and current customers. But, think about this. Who owns your social media followers’ and friends’ contact information?
Social media can’t replace email marketing
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram own those details. So, if Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram shutdown (a long, long stretch) or changed their rules (not as farfetched), how would you keep in touch with the hundreds or thousands of social media followers you’d already spent marketing dollars to get?
Build your own in-house email marketing database and you would have the information that you need to keep communicating with these valuable contacts. That doesn’t mean that you can’t get a lot out of social media. You can. You should.
While you’re posting Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest messages, polls and images, offer your followers free white papers, tip sheets, coupons and free newsletter subscriptions. Include a link to a search engine optimized landing page. Ask responders for their name and email address.
Email marketing and social media marry
If your company warm calls prospects, request responders’ telephone numbers as well. Add responders’ contact details to your in-house contact list. As a tip, easy to use contact list development tools include Excel (or another spreadsheet application), Constant Contact, MailChimp, iContact, Benchmark and Pinpointe. Purch has a good review of the top 10 email marketing services.
Email marketing and distribution services save you time and effort. To update email marketing contact lists, simply add a short code to your website and let visitors subscribe themselves to your contact lists. Once a month or once a quarter, download the contacts into a database (i.e. Word, Excel) that you save on your business computer, again maintaining full ownership of the data.
Pay attention to when you send email marketing messages. Send emails, especially electronic newsletters, on Tuesday and Thursday and you could increase your number of opens. Your target audience can impact the best times to send emails significantly.
For example, if you’re emailing college students during the summer, early morning emails might go unnoticed. On the other hand, emailing C-Level executives before 8am could work. For emails with deadlines (i.e. sales with soon approaching end dates), get emails out three to five days in advance of the event.
Pay attention to email marketing results
Check out email marketing stats. Things to look for include open rates, social shares, clicks, un-subscribes and new subscribers. Add images to email to increase opens and reads. If you get in the habit of including valuable coupons and other deals in emails, not only might your email contact list grow, subscribers could start pinging you, asking when your next email is coming.
Should more people unsubscribe after you send emails or newsletters that have three or more ads in them, reduce your ads to one or two. See if fewer people unsubscribe. As with other business strategies, tweak and change your email marketing actions.
This means changing the dates and times when you send emails. It also means adding feature interviews, quotes, quizzes, downloadable apps and sales codes to emails and monitoring the results. Some marketers advise that you upload email contacts from your personal databases into social media accounts. It’s a great way to build social media connects. Just remember identify the types of relationships you have with these people. Your 65-year old Aunt Serena might not want to get an email about each high heeled shoe sale you’re boutique is running.
