Ok ok, I know what you're thinking. I get a ton of junk emails, why do I want to send even more of it to my clients/potential clients? How do I distinguish myself between all of the noise?
For context, it should be noted that at Shopify, the trends they see during BFCM (Black Friday, Cyber Monday) each year predict the ecommerce trends for the following year. With this in mind, Shopify's BFCM recap stated that emails had the highest conversion rate.
As you can see in the chart above, email marketing led to a conversation rate which was more than double what businesses saw coming from social. Some contributing factors to this trend may be a more effective use of email marketing or the implementation of merchants using email marketing at all (and thus, a new and welcome channel for clients to keep up with their favourite businesses).
The thing I would stay immediately about email marketing is that it's the most effective way for a business to own its clients. When you utilize a platform such as Instagram or YouTube or Twitter, you as the business don't own your subscribers or followers. The platform owns them. For most people, most of the time that doesn't matter at all. But it does mean that these platforms have a lot of control over the fate of your business - which can definitely be concerning.
I remember an enterprise-level client of mine booking a call with me once because she noticed her Instagram following was becoming less engaged even though what they were doing with their social media hadn't changed at all. She was hoping I'd have some insight on Instagram's newest algorithm which would give her the ability to tweak how they connected with their followers. When Instagram owns your potential clients, Instagram limits the way you interact with them - and sometimes that's for the better as it encourages to to create better, more interactive content, but sometimes it's to the detriment of your business' sales and bottom line.
I would argue that email marketing is the first place where you should invest your marketing dollars but this needs to happen at the same time as collecting subscribers for your mailing list. We'll target the how-to of collecting email subscribers in our own newsletter this week so make sure you're receiving that!
If you're still not convinced you need to invest in getting your newsletters up and running consider the following fun facts:
- When it comes to newsletters, each subscriber means $1 in monthly revenue, growing your list and providing quality content can mean big returns.
- With traditional social media, only 6% of your followers are actually seeing your content
- Your message is 5x more likely to be seen via email than through Facebook. This is because there's no algorithm holding back your message from your potential clients and since they've invited you to contact them via email, they're much more likely to be interested in what you have to say.
So what are you waiting for? Get started on your newsletters today!
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