Everyone buzzes about social media, blogs, and search engine optimization, but what about email? Most companies just forget about the old email newsletter. (Even us. We haven’t sent one in a while. Whoops!)
The printed newsletter was an old standby to keep customers up-to-date, involved, and feeling valued. It translated nicely to email when the Internet started, but it seems today many businesses have dropped the newsletter in favor of other marketing methods.
The newsletter sign up box used to be ubiquitous on most websites. Now, many customers never ask for one. And if they do, they generally never use those email addresses. Maybe once a year for the holidays, when most people are so jammed full of spam they usually delete everything anyway!
Is that the best move? Should we all just move on from email like it’s an out-dated technology?
How Email Stacks Up
Are more people using Facebook and Twitter than reading email? Why is your email address so valuable to large companies?
Our friends at RedWriteWeb put together this handy infographic comparing email to those other methods of communication:
original source: http://m.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/09/the-value-of-email-infographic.php
Yeah, so email is kinda kicking all sorts of buttocks here. More people use email, and they use it more often. It’s not even close.
Conclusion
If you have a list of customer email addresses, it’s time to use them by sending out regular emails. Make sure to include valuable information and reminders. In other words, say, “Hey! We’re still in business, and we’re awesome!” (Yep, we’re gonna work on doing that ourselves.)
Customers who aren’t interested will unsubscribe. Maybe they’ll come back on their own, but if not then you haven’t really lost anything.
If you don’t yet have an email list then it’s time to get one going. Add a sign up box to your website, collect emails on paper sign ups in store or at conventions. Just don’t purchase a list; that would be bad.
And if you need some help, we’ve got you covered with our Email Marketing Service. We’ll get you signed up with MailChimp, integrate the sign up form into your website, and build you a custom template so you can email customers in style.
And, of course, you can sign up for our email newsletter here: http://eepurl.com/b_UWL
