While email has lost some of its allure since its inception almost 50 years ago ~ partly thanks to social media ~ the effectiveness of email marketing for a small business can not be understated.
Email marketing is still effective, yet, many companies fail to master the art of the marketing email. Why? – because many companies try to push their products or services 100% of the time. When was the last time that you watched a television channel that was entirely commercials? Most people do not enjoy watching late-night infomercials until the wee hours of the morning!
You want to structure your email in a way that it provides entertainment, education, and utility for the reader ~ and you can sprinkle advertising of your products or services into the email in such a way that goes along with those themes. Some of the most popular platforms for hosting email marketing campaigns are MailChimp and Constant Contact. They are easy to use and have plenty of email templates that will get you started in no time.
With that being said, here are three reasons why email marketing might be better than social media marketing for your small business.
1. Email is very efficient at reaching highly targeted audiences
Long gone are the days of purchasing massive amounts of random email lead lists. Sending marketing emails to these addresses will only result in being placed into the SPAM box and having people unsubscribe in the off-chance that your emails make it to the inbox.
Even then, these emails are likely not going to be sent to a targeted audience.
If a business owner can focus on collecting emails from prospective clients either through online offers, in-store events, or having a form on their website where one submits their email address for a promotion, the business will have a list of email leads of people that actually have an interest in purchasing your goods or services.
If you manage to collect 10 thousand emails, and have an open rate of 10-20%, you have reached the eyes of 1-2 thousand people who have already expressed interest in your products/services.
It is difficult to do this on social media unless you want to spend time hoping that you potential clients “like / follow” certain types of pages or unless you spend to fork over a lot more money compared to email marketing services.
2. Some social media platforms, such as Facebook, have low organic reach.
Facebook has transformed its algorithm over the years to favor posts from users’ friends and family. This means that if Susan Johnson’s friend posts at the exact same time that a business she follows posts, Susan will see her friends post on her Facebook feed much sooner than she sees the business’s post.
This makes advertising your brand as a business on Facebook increasingly difficulty unless you are willing to pay money in advertisements and in boosted posts.
Our business of over 1000 followers can expect 6-12% organic reach with each post, sometimes a little more when we post an engaging video.
3. You can include a lot of information into an email compared to social media posts
Emails by nature are much larger than your average social media post. With all of the available space comes great responsibility!
You don’t want to shove numerous offers into the readers face without having a healthy mix of content that is informational, entertaining, and engaging.
If you desire, you can structure your emails like a newsletter – show customer reviews, new products, success stories of people using your products / services, videos, and more.
It is difficulty to do all of these in one social media post, but it is possible in email.
We hope that this post was informative and can help business owners get on top of their email marketing campaigns.
Thank you for reading – US Fast Print – usfastprint.com