Think Email Marketing Is Dead? Think Again!
by: Karen Scharf, Small Business Marketing
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The other day I was working with a client to develop his 2009 business and marketing plan, and he told me he wanted to eliminate his email newsletter from his marketing strategy. He figured it was no longer necessary since he was going to explore web 2.0 tactics and social media marketing.
Luckily, I was able to get him to rethink that decision. Even in the era of social media and podcasts on demand and online video sharing sites, I still think email marketing provides the best return on your marketing dollar.
First, if you’ve been in business for any length of time, you already know that the cost of acquiring a new customer far outweighs the cost of keeping a current customer. Some estimates range as high as 500 times more expensive to get a new customer. While social media definitely has its place in marketing your business, an email newsletter provides you with a means of staying in touch with current customers on a regular basis – and with their on-going permission. And a simple 5% increase in your customer retention can result in as much as a 75-100% increase in profits.
When compared to social media, email marketing is much easier to generate referrals from. It’s true that on-line videos and blog posts can easily become viral, but the process is mostly out of your control, and rarely do you get the opportunity to capture the new viewers’ contact information. On the other hand, by including a simple “forward to a friend” link in your email newsletter, you can quickly watch your prospect list grow. As you’re probably aware, it’s much more cost effective to grow your business through referrals than by trying to find new prospects on your own.
It’s also much easier to track and measure email marketing than it is with social media. On-line video and other social media tactics allow few options for measuring your return on investment. Your email newsletter, however, is instantly measurable, providing fact-based, real time statistics. You can see how many prospects opened your message, how many clicked through to your web site, who opened your message, which links were clicked, etc. This information is invaluable when it comes to designing and improving future marketing campaigns.
The immediacy of email marketing is an extremely attractive feature. A message can be crafted, tested and sent in only a few hours – and the results can start pouring in immediately. This comes in very handy for small business owners who might need to raise some quick cash, move some product by a certain deadline, or just get a mandatory message out right away.
Email marketing is generally less time consuming than social media marketing. Now I am not a proponent of slapping together an email message and clicking the Send button. Email marketing does require some effort… there are copywriting considerations and spam compliance and design and rendering issues and delivery constraints. But once the process is understood, the majority of marketers can initiate an email marketing campaign in much less time than it would take to produce an on-line video.
And then we have another factor to consider: cost. Email marketing is far and away one of the most cost effective marketing tactics we have at our disposal. Email can literally be sent for mere pennies, which is often all that a small business has to spend.
So, if you’re thinking that email marketing is passé or out dated due to the introduction of social media, I hope you’ll think again. As you’re preparing your 2009 business and marketing plan, be sure to include email marketing as one of your major marketing tactics.
And by the way, we’ll be raising the price of our Email Marketing Toolkit in just 2 short weeks, so you might want to download your copy now!
August 23rd, 2009 at 4:31 pm
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