Email is a social media network. Many marketers give it far less attention than it deserves, but the numbers back it up. As of 2013, there were 3.6 billion email accounts worldwide, 91 percent of consumers checked their emails daily, and 66 percent of consumers have made an online purchase because of email marketing messages.
So people use email, they check it daily, and they buy directly as a result of email marketing. You can see how email marketing delivers a 4,300% ROI. It works. Period.
Email is a home
So why does email marketing work?”
It works because your email inbox is your personal online home. Just like your mailbox at your real home or your phone in your pocket, you check your email vigilantly because you use it to keep track of your life. It’s your central communications hub, reserved for trusted sources of information, business interactions and real people you know or want to know.
Just like direct mail marketing reaches people at their physical homes, email marketing is the best way to reach people on their online homes, where they personally check, every single day.
How is email a social media network?
Unlike direct mail marketing, email IS social. How? For starters, if you want to be successful, people have to give you permission to market to them through email, making it a personal medium. Most people only read emails from sources they know or from people who have mutual contacts. The law even protects consumers from receiving marketing emails from companies they don’t know.
At Gorilla 76, we follow standard practice and only send marketing messages to people who’ve given us their email addresses, either in-person through business cards or online through sign-up forms.
If we’re doing our job well, they look forward to hearing what we have to say as their trusted advisor on industrial web marketing. They don’t necessarily view our emails as marketing, hopefully, they view them as an educational resource. Since they’ve expressed an interest in web marketing materials, we count them as leads. Then we use a marketing automation system to further develop relationships with those leads so they become sales.
In addition to being a personal means of asking for marketing communications, email is also social because it’s many people’s primary way of sharing information with their closest contacts. People send emails to specific coworkers, clients or friends. When you send an email, you can dive more in-depth than you can with text message, personalize more than you can with a Tweet or a Facebook Post, and take up less of people’s time than you can with a phone call.
B2B email marketing strategy
Staying at a 10,000-foot level, think about the way we use email. We share ideas, tips, and guides. We quickly scan news. And we keep up with personal correspondence to maintain contact with friends, colleagues, coworkers, customers and clients.
Remember, your goal is to turn the leads (people who’ve shown interest in your offering by giving you an email address) into clients and customers. You want to send them information that will allow them to get to know your company. Send them information that’s useful and actionable and will lead them to keep coming back to your website. Send them information that educates them about your industry and about your business. Send them information that directly helps them in their business. And track everything so you know what brings them to your site and what ultimately drives sales.
You’ve got the strategy, now get the tactics that work. Click below to download our marketing automation guide and learn how to pay off your marketing