With the explosion of social media combined with all of the great tools and resources for marketing your small business online, you may be asking, “Why should I bother with email marketing? Isn’t that yesterday’s technology?”
Absolutely not!
In fact, email is still the most important online marketing tool for small businesses and will continue to be for years to come. All of your other marketing choices and tools should be revolving around your email marketing efforts. Everything should start and end with your email list and here are the two main reasons why:
1. No one knows where Facebook or Twitter or anything else will go or what they will do in the future.
A perfect example of this is the major update facebook made in 2010 which removed the word “fans” from facebook pages and replaced it with “like”. Although this may seem insignificant it perfectly demonstrates that Facebook, along with any other online social media company will always change and adapt with their own best interest as first priority – as they should.
It is debatable on whether this is more or less advantageous for small business pages. The point however is that YOU don’t get to decide, only Facebook does. The problem occurs when any small business puts too much emphasis, capital, or time investments into one particular medium in which you have no control over. When you don’t have control, then whatever investments you have made could ultimately disappear tomorrow.
This is why email marketing trumps them all. You have ultimate control, as long as your subscribers continue to want to hear from you. When you own the list, then you own the medium.
Of course you should have many marketing channels in play at all times, including social media. But they should begin and end with email being the primary source of communication and then complemented by all the others.
2. Most small businesses pay to use other marketing channels (paid advertising), smart businesses own their marketing channels.
If you invest heavily on building social followers without actually getting their information, then you don’t own your marketing channel.
Start with building your email lists and you will have a valuable assest in which you can grow your other marketing channels from.
Let’s start out with collecting those opt-in’s (those are the people who give you their email address and permission to contact them). And what’s the easiest way to do that?