Despite the fact that email has been around a hell of a long time and it still delivers the best possible return on investment (ROI) of any marketing technique (online or offline), many people still don’t get it.
I speak to business owners and marketers every day who are missing out on the golden opportunity of email. Here is a short list of some of the stupid things they tell me and why they are wrong.
We need to get into email marketing, it’s the future.
Email marketing isn’t the future; it’s the here and now. It is, more than any other form of marketing, your best chance to drive revenues (and profits) from your existing clients and prospects.
Email marketing is dead. It’s all about social media now.
Rather than killing email, social media has strengthened its proposition. Social media is an amazing place to engage your clients and prospects in conversation, but it is not a great sales venue. This is because people don’t like to be sold to in a social environment. Email, on the other hand, is very much a place of work where people not only expect to be sold to, they actively welcome it.
Email marketing is dead. It’s all about mobile now.
About 65% of all emails are opened on mobile devices. Like social media, mobile has also strengthened email marketing’s proposition. Mobile has freed the inbox from the desktop, giving you a greater opportunity to hit your subscribers at a time and place when they are more likely to make a buying decision.
I’m waiting until my list reaches critical mass before I send my first campaign.
The average age of an email address is 18 months. That means if you sit on a list for any length of time, your list will have decayed and will not be as big as you think it is. People also have short memories. Just because someone had a relationship with you last year doesn’t mean he or she will remember you when you finally make contact. Your most successful email will always be the first one you send following a registration or purchase. So remember to hit your subscribers while they are hot.
I’d like to give email marketing a try. Where can I buy a list?
You cannot buy a list. Email’s success is based on the permission your list recipients have given you to contact them. When you buy a list, no matter what your broker tells you, you do not have permission to send commercial emails to its members, and your campaign will have all the hallmarks of a spam campaign.
I’m focusing all my efforts on paid search.
Paid search is a fantastic acquisition channel but can be very expensive. The high cost of an individual click can very often destroy any profit margin you might have in a product or service. This is where email marketing comes in by driving repeat orders and increasing customer lifetime value. I like to think of email marketing as the profitable component of more expensive acquisition techniques. Remember, if you pay to acquire the same customers again and again, you may never see a profit from them.
I do email marketing. We send out a monthly newsletter.
While the monthly newsletter does have a place in your email marketing strategy, it is not the be-all and end-all. In many cases it is an afterthought and as such is rushed and therefore lacks quality and is unlikely to drive much in the way of engagement. Remember, email will only deliver a positive ROI when your campaigns are relevant, engaging and timely. This might mean putting a little more thought into your campaigns than you currently do with your newsletter.
Do you recognize any of the aforementioned stupid comments? Get on the right track and kick-start your email marketing campaigns by downloading iContact’s special Building Creative Email Marketing Strategies whitepaper.
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