Email Marketing - A Powerful Tool for Your Business
One of the excellent ways to get connected and engaged with your clients is using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. However, people claim that email marketing no longer remains effective and relevant because of the success of social media.
Stop listening to them, as these are just misconceptions. Email marketing is still alive and doing well as one of the most effective and powerful techniques of online marketing and being in touch with your clients.
Defining Email Marketing
Firstly, you must know what email marketing is, before moving towards the reasons explaining why it is so useful in business.
When a person visits your website and thinks of subscribing to your mailing list with the aim to keep in touch with you through email, it is known as email marketing. A mailing list like this is quite important if you are selling a service or product. Email marketing enables you to build customer loyalty, earn trust and promote brand awareness while encouraging your subscribers to purchase from you more often.
Email marketing has several benefits. Although, it is a great marketing tool however, unfortunately, it seems to possess a bad reputation with a few businesses, who fail to understand it fully.
Some companies are of the view that people immediately consider finding an email from a stranger and they delete it, thinking badly about their company.
This may be true to some extent, chiefly because businesses have failed to take the time for nurturing their list. Nevertheless, with responsible marketing, an email marketing campaign can be made to work exceptionally well for your business.
Email Marketing Against Social Media Marketing
As explained earlier, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are superb ways to connect with both existing and potential clients. They are ideal platforms to go for word of mouth advertising, creating strong bond with your current audience and putting yourself in front of a new audience.
Both of these tools are necessary for your business. However, you cannot keep a check over who is seeing your updates or when they are seen.
Apart from this, you cannot control these connections fully, as social media sites like Twitter, Facebook keep making changes without notifying how they could affect the way you are connecting with your followers.
Social media sites do not provide you the opportunity to connect people one-on-one as you can connect through emails. Using email marketing, your promotional campaigns can be fine-tuned by you, while forming a list of people who show genuine interest in whatever you are offering.
With Twitter for example, your message is competing with hundreds or even thousands of other Tweets from companies promoting similar products or services to yours. The same is true on Facebook.
Even if you have a huge number of fans, they certainly are following other pages as well, which reduces your message's effect. The same thing is true about emails but by sending a personalized email, you can gain their attention as they would actually open and read your email. The distractions present on social networks including recent status updates, chat options and new photos are not there in email marketing.
For this reason, it is important for you to make an effort and transform your followers into your email-marketing list as soon as possible. Once it is done, you have full control and authority as they are in the list of YOUR contacts. You will lose them only if they choose to unsubscribe from your email list.
How Can You Make Your Social Network Followers to Subscribe Your List?
It is not at all difficult. You just have to provide them with the reason for joining you. For instance, offer them something for which they would not mind giving their email address is a good idea.
You could offer a how-to guide, special offer or an answer addressing a particular issue or problem that is bothering your audience, exclusive information or special type of voucher or discount, especially for all your email subscribers.
You must select something that is not only of real value to your email subscribers, but is also of interest to your target audience.
Such actions are not enough to keep your email list active and interested. To avoid losing these valuable connections, you are required to think how you can constantly deliver information that help them remain engaged and persuade them to open the email sent by you.
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