For the past year, I have been preaching that social media (Facebook, twitter, et. Al.) is where clients should be focusing their online marketing dollars. While I still believe that more and more people are turning to these outlets for information, I do not believe in a single, silver bullet for targeting potential and existing customers.
It is true that over 60 percent of online marketing dollars will be spent on social media management and relationship building in 2012, the runner up is email. I would also argue from past experience, that email marketing can be more cost effective when you look at actual dollars spent to revenue. In fact, I feel that in a business to business situation, email is more accepted as a method of communication.
NO SPAMMING – Let me take a moment to define what I mean about email marketing. I’m not talking about purchasing a list of email addresses and sending an email blindly to the list. I’m talking about utilizing an existing customer list or a list that was cultivated through a special event promotion or offline method. With that said, the use of regular and targeted email messages to the company list can have many benefits but the emails must be targeted an simple.
KEEP IT SIMPLE - Gone are the days of a huge, monthly email newsletter. People already receive a huge amount of email on a daily basis so it is important to reach a balance of the amount of information in each email vs. the frequency that it is sent. The email should be crafted in a way that it is easy to scan for only the information that the viewer finds interesting, and if at all possible, provide an excerpt with a link to a blog post or web page with the full details of the story.
DESIGN MATTERS – Many email list providers offer do it yourself templates for email. I could go on and on why I feel that template based any things are a bad idea, but I will just say that you are a unique company. Why would you want to look generic? Take the time and have a professional designer layout your email in a way that the design looks and feels like your company and it utilizes design principles that allow for easy scanning and proper use of typography.
By following this approach to your email marketing in conjunction with a solid social media campaign (not just a parrot of your email campaign) you will achieve a solid 1-2 punch to online marketing for 2012 that reaches your audience no matter which outlet they prefer.
If you would like more information about how we utilize email with existing saucepan creative clients, please contact us today! info@inthesaucepan.com or (317) 773-2194
