By Tim Parker: Email marketing is one of the best ways to reach your customers. Not only is it more effective than some marketing methods, it's also less expensive. Here's how you can successfully use email marketing to reach prospects and customers.
The results are in and an old favorite that was largely written off by small business owners is the clear winner. If you want to reach your customers, put a lot of time and effort into e-mail marketing.
If you follow digital marketing trends you know that social media has mightily replaced e-mail as the most talked about means of reaching customers. Proponents tout the fact that you can target ads to certain demographics with unprecedented accuracy. Do you want to reach mothers with an upper middle class income that have a child who recently started driving? You can do that through social media advertising.
But what the proponents fail to mention is that you can’t get much more targeted than e-mail because everybody on your list (if it’s a list obtained legitimately), are people who gave you permission to market to them. They’re interested in what you have to say or they wouldn’t have signed up for your e-mail list.
There’s also the fact that checking e-mail is the first thing most of us do every day when we wake up. According to statistics, 91 percent of customers check their e-mail at least once per day. Considering there are more than 3.6 billion existing e-mail accounts, that’s a lot of people.
The stats get even better. More than 74 percent of customers prefer to receive marketing messages through e-mail and nearly half of e-mails are read on mobile devices. Finally, the average order value of an e-mail is 17 percent higher than social media.
Convinced yet? If you aren’t using e-mail as a marketing tool, you’re failing to tap in to the single best online vehicle your business could have for producing revenue.
The Glaring Problem
Of course, there’s a problem. You have to build your e-mail list. When digital marketing was in its infancy, business owners purchased e-mail lists much like they did a physical mailing list.
Although you could still do it today, you can’t do it legally. Anti-spam laws require that everybody on your e-mail list opt-in meaning that before they receive an e-mail from your company, they have to accept your invitation.
Even if you could buy a list legally, you won’t see good results. Popular e-mail marketing platform Survey Monkey compiled historical data from the days when purchased e-mail lists were popular. It found that open rates were terrible. In fact, it was so bad that people wouldn’t even open the e-mail to unsubscribe.
How to Build a List the Right Way
If you can’t purchase a list of leads, what can you do? You can double back to the often-talked-about advertising platform of the cool kids, Facebook.
Facebook has an ad type that helps you to drive traffic to your website. Would you pay a shiny dime (or less) for somebody to join your e-mail list? Statistics show that for every dollar spent on e-mail marketing, business owners will see a $41 return. A dime is pennies compared to the potential return you’ll see from your e-mail list.