Broaching the subject of email marketing with clients tends to evoke skepticism. The initial reaction is that email is dead, assuming that no customers want more in their inboxes. However, when I ask them to look deeper into their own inboxes, they tend to find at least one enewsletter that they happily receive and interact with. According to a recent survey by McKinsey & Co, email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than social media. Fact is, an enewsletter done right can be a powerful sales tool.
The reason email marketing has such a bad reputation is poor business practices. It used to be that companies just added anyone to their email lists and bombard unsuspecting people with irrelevant emails. The CAN-SPAM Act, passed in 2003, set best practices and imposed stiff penalties for organizations that did not follow them. But why would you want to spam the people you are interested in doing business anyway? The key to effective email marketing is an opt-in only list, where interested parties willingly subscribe to your enewsletter themselves. It makes sense that talking to people who want to listen would be more effective than to those who do not.
Building your email list should be included in your goals for your digital marketing efforts. Offer many easy opportunities to opt-in by placing sign up links in every digital communication. An encouraging sentence with a link within your one-to-one emails, sign-up apps within your social media profiles, and forms on your website are all good ideas. Also consider creating incentives to sign up like exclusive access to information or savings.
Once you have a list, it is your job to reward your subscribers with engaging content. Remember, just like social media, enewsletters are a digital marketing tool. The goal of digital marketing is to bring your target market to your website- your real estate on the web. Fill your enewsletter with reasons to visit your website through teasers and links to good information. Subscribers who click through then see the robust conversion strategies you have in place. Think of enewsletters as placing a promotional print ad encouraging visitors to your brick & mortar location. The click through is the visit. Once they arrive, it is time to sell.
In some ways the skeptics are right. Email marketing targeting uninterested people is dead. However, it should have never been alive in the first place.
This article was originally published in the Carmel Business Leader
