With Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs, and instant messaging available, a lot of small businesses and professionals – the complacent ones — question the effectiveness of Email Marketing.
Couldn’t I just post a status update to Facebook instead of sending a marketing email? Couldn’t I spend that time concentrating on other marketing activities? I get most of my business by word of mouth, through the yellow pages. Who needs it?
Consider the following statistics, from a 2011 study by News Broadcast Network, Inc.
- 83% of business people check email first every single day
- 72% check it 6 or more times per day
And consider this: to get an account on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, what’s the first thing you need? Yep, an email address. Because email is fast, convenient, and green, consumers prefer using email for business correspondence. And, unlike a Twitter account, practically everyone has one.
So, have you you looked in your inbox recently and paid attention to who uses email marketing?
Large companies such as Target, WalMart, Groupon, to name a few. Sure, they have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts just like you. But, in addition, they use email marketing, they use it often, and they use it well. Your competitors are also using email marketing, taking the lunch right off your table.
That’s because they understand three marketing essentials that all successful businesseses understand. And I’m not talking about the theoretical 3 P’s of marketing you may have learned in college: product, place, and price. Sure, those are relevant.
What I’m talking about the real 3 P’s: persistence, persistence, persistence.
Different studies show different statistics, but the general rule of thumb with any business is that the customer must be exposed to your offering at least 7 or 8 times before they will make a decision to purchase.
In addition, the customer learns about your business the same way they learn facts in school. Our educational system demonstrates that being exposed to knowledge in a variety of forms, over and over again, will reinforce that knowledge to the point that it becomes easily recalled.
So, is it enough that the customer sees your ad in the Google sponsored links? No.
Is it enough that the customer visits your website and reads about the wonderful products and services you offer? No, but getting warmer.
The fact is, your marketing efforts need to support one another in order to make that final sale.
For example, your potential customer visited the website you worked hard on. That’s great – money well spent on the web hosting. But what now? Cross your fingers and hope they’re in a buying mood?
An inexpensive, personalized, and proven approach is to capture the email address of your website visitor. Offer them free information, a free gift, an incentive for subscribing to your mailing list. Then, you have on your hands a gold mine. A formula for getting the customer to your site again and again, without blowing your advertising budget.
The special offer they receive in their inbox may be that 7th or 8th exposure they’ve had to your business — the one that makes the sale.
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