One of the biggest pitfalls people fall into when they’re trying to reach existing and potential customers is relying on social media to get the job done. The reality is that these tools — while important — actually don’t reach the people you want to get in touch with all that effectively.
That’s a basic mantra of modern day communications. If you email someone, they will certainly get it at some point. The same thing applies to your customers, and you should be using it to your advantage.
The money is in the list! But why?
The main reason is that the vast majority of people who use the Internet also use email (90 per cent of users, according to internetworldstats.com). Having an email address is almost synonymous with Internet usage. Also, changing your email address is always a pain and only happens after a lot of kicking and screaming. People still hang on to their old hotmail accounts. If you have someone’s email address, you have a more or less permanent way to get in touch with them, whereas a Facebook or Twitter account can be simply deleted or ignored.
Your email is much more likely to be read. Research has shown that the lifetime of a Facebook post is about four or five hours. Most people who are going to see the post will see it in that time, after which the likelihood of someone reading it goes down. For Twitter, this lifetime is only an hour. 75 per cent of people won’t even see your Facebook posts, and 90 per cent of Twitter followers will miss a tweet.
Email, on the other hand, will continue to be read at a stead pace for about 12 days before the likelihood of someone reading it goes down. Your email list will penetrate and actually be seen instead of ignored or missed entirely.
People check their email religiously, so having your message appear there will make it that much more effective.
Finally, an email is personal.
Not only are they more likely to read something you send to them, they are also engaged on a personal level because they’ve invested that part of themselves to you already.
This makes it important to send whatever it is you send to your email list from an account you can reply with and never pester them with spam or junk mail. Sometimes people may want to send you a message back with questions or comments. This allows you to talk to your subscribers in a one-on-one environment, a much more personal approach than a public post that anybody could stumble by and read.
Email is still the king of getting the message out, no matter what that message might be.