Does email marketing still work? Is social media not better? Email is old school! These are questions you have continued to ask and I think going through these basic points will help you build a community of people who have signified they love your business ; they want to hear from you and are willing to buy from you.
The New Year, 2014, will be the year of content marketing and emails will become more relevant.
As people and businesses are more empowered to generate content online, there will be a lot of noise such that people who are interested in using the Internet to drive their business objectives will go beyond selling into building an audience.
Email marketing will move conversations about your business away from the noise of the Internet into a more personalised environment of your target audience – their inbox.
An average person who accesses emails on the phone does so about 15 times a day,that is if there are no notifications of a new email, the potential of selling through email is huge.
Let your website be smarter: Websites are no longer a want, but an integral part of running your business. How it looks will have an impact on whether people will do business with you.
Your website should remain your most powerful marketing tool. Everyday people are going online to search for products and services; they will snoop around websites, seeking more information, credibility, reviews and how to reach you.
Your website should effectively sell your product and services even when you are asleep. If your website cannot answer basic questions like; Who are you? Can I see what you have done? Where are you located? Why should I trust you? Is there someone I can talk to? If your website is not answering these questions, you may have been losing business opportunities.
Is it okay to buy emails and phone numbers? Frankly I am not a fan of buying emails and phone numbers but collecting them. However, if you must buy, buy targeted and segmented emails and so you know the people you are trying to reach which will influence the kind of message you are sending to them.
Avoid mass numbers and emails like a plague. Why buy phone numbers and emails of everyone and sending a blast, hoping you will make one per cent of them buy your product/service? Hard sell is not selling as it used to, people are getting smarter.
For a boutique which intends to send a marketing message, which is better? Sending a message to all persons in your vicinity or a list of women that attended a fashion festival?. How about the idea that you asked people to submit their emails and numbers to receive updates?
Focus on value exchange not hard sell: It is possible to keep sending emails to people and people are not buying because email marketing is about building relationships not a transaction counter. Focus on offering value, demonstrate your expertise, create something awesome and offer people to exchange their emails for it. For example, a pharmacy which sells cancer drugs and offer an ebook on managing cancer in exchange for emails, you offer tips on detecting cancer and somewhere along the line offer something to sell. You have built a higly-targeted love relationship that can translate into cash every time you have a special offer.
Own a landing page: This one ingredient is missing on most business websites. A landing or sales page is designed to promote what you offer and is just a page on our website. A landing page is what you want people to see when you advertise, it is where you pitch or sell to your website visitors. Depending on your objective, you can use the page to collect emails and phone numbers of people visiting your website.
Marry email and social media: Social media is not at war with email marketing but they serve to complement each other. Social media is an online community, your email campaign is a customer buillding tool. You can thereore use both channels to build your customer base.
Advertise on Facebook and Twitter, use it to drive traffic to your website, portfolio or landing page to collect emails or promote sales. From there you can build a subscriber list that can generate finds for you and your business. But remember social media will drive traffic, email will close the sales. Is it more effective than hand bills? Hand bills are nice, they give you a physical promotional material you can hand out to people, but that is the end. You will need to get it into the hands of the potential customers and that is where the work is; if they do not throw it away, they are used as bookmarks, jotters, thrown around on the road and very depressing to the business owner.
With email marketing, everything is done online, no pressing need to print real copies. I think depending on your target audience, cost- effectiveness ratio, I still think email marketing eats handbills for breakfast.
You want simple steps to get started? Talk to your designer and get your website together, get a landing page, integrate an autoresponder platform, advertise and promote your offers, communicate with your list and reap the beneits of building a relationship with your audience.
Somehow, today’s companies will not only think like marketers, they will also think like publishers.2014 can be your best year ever, if you put your heart to doing things differently. See you at the other side.
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