Email is a Preferred Marketing Channel
A recent survey conducted by smartFOCUS finds that email is the preferred channel of communication for many US consumers. The survey results indicate that 62% of the respondents prefer email as their preferred channel of communication, followed by 33% who prefer direct mail and 13% who prefer social media. Not surprising, over 80% of the survey respondents place telemarketing as their least preferred method of contact.
This is useful data for small business. With the mad rush to leverage the latest trends including social media and social marketing, let’s not overlook the tried and tested, proven marketing channels that your customers are most comfortable with.
I find in my own business practice, while I make an effort to encourage my customers and contacts to leverage other communication channels, I see many people hanging on to the email channel with an enthusiastic grip. And there is no question that email follow-up marketing remains one of the most effective ways for small business to reach their market online and convert leads and prospects to satisfied customers.
While many of us complain about the volume of SPAM and junk mail that we battle everyday in our email in-boxes, I believe email marketing remains effective and popular for a couple of reasons:
- We all use email - no matter how many different tools we may prefer to use to communicate online, we all have an email account. In fact, it would be difficult to survive online without email.
- Everyone is familiar with email – even the least sophisticated of our user and customer base know how to use email. For example, while some may not take the time to learn how to use an RSS reader, and others may not have any interest or time for a Facebook account, virtually everyone you contact and communicate with online can deal with email.
- Email and multi-media - with the advanced multi-media technologies well integrated in today’s email, effective elements including video and images are easy to embed in your email marketing message. And with improved bandwidth today, downloading some of these rich media components attached to an email is much more tolerable.
- Email on my time - while we all complain at one time or another about too many emails piling up in our email boxes, we still have the control to manage our email on our time and terms. An unsolicited phone call is still much more annoying and “in your face” than an email, even an unsolicited email.
- Personal touch – there’s something a little more personal about exchanging email. Delivering a message by email gives you the opportunity to take a conversational approach. People find this style of communication more accessible. And with the automation technologies available today, you can personalize email communication and make people feel as though they are the single focus of the message. Even though most of us realize when we receive a boilerplate email message, when it’s personalized with our name, we still feel like the message is directed to us.
Experienced marketers fully understand the power of the customer list. There’s nothing more powerful to expand your business and harvest more sales than conducting email marketing campaigns to your in-house list of customers, leads and targeted prospects.
If you’re not collecting emails addresses from your prospects and visitors to your business website or blog, you need to get started today. And the good news is that capturing emails and names is very straightforward to integrate into your blog.
With solutions available from aWeber Communications, GetResponse by Implix, and Constant Contact, setting up an autoresponder and integrating email follow-up marketing directly from your small business blog is easy to manage.
So if you’re thinking that email marketing is yesterday’s technology, stop leaving money on the table. When the survey says 62% of US consumers prefer the email channel, you should listen!
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