As advocates of social media marketing for small to medium business, we’re always pleased to see business owners who throw themselves whole-heartedly into feeding their Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest pages with interesting updates and content that excites their fans and followers. Unfortunately, many of these same folks neglect their email marketing campaigns, thinking that a strong social presence is enough to take the place of a monthly newsletter.
When it comes to building serious business relationships with partners and clients, you might want to consider making email campaigns your priority. Think about it this way: wouldn’t you rather use a single channel to talk to all your customers than divide your energy between multiple channels to talk to only some of them, some of the time — in ways that don’t always have the same professional impact?
We’re not suggesting that you use email exclusively — only that you make it your priority over social channels. It’s not necessarily that people spend more time with email than on Twitter or searching Google, although some do. But unlike social networks, email campaigns give you a way to make repeated, direct contact where tweeting or posting something on G+ may be overlooked by your target customer, as they see hundreds of messages streaming through their timelines and feeds. With all that information available to the reader, if you don’t hit just the right person with just the right message, you’ve not made any impact at all. That’s a lot of wasted time.
With an email campaign, your message will sit there in your customer’s inbox — waiting to be read or trashed – but in either case, it doesn’t just get lost in a crowded feed or scroll out of your customers’ view. Provided you give them something worth reading, your customers will make time to read it. If they like what they read, then in time they will start to look forward to your emails.
This article in the Capital One Spark blog (Forbes.com) gives some hard numbers and makes a persuasive case for why email is still more effective than social media marketing. You might also want to check out this inforgraphic by Host Papa, which illustrates an epic showdown between email marketing and social media marketing.
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