As social media is becoming more interesting and inviting, many businesses are now abandoning the use of email marketing. While internalising both media could effectively catapult your business, due process has to be followed to ensure that this is implemented properly. According to Lisa Morgan from Insights Online Merchants, linking email with social media is conceptually interesting because it combines two different animals: direct response and organic communities. Using email we still tend to unilaterally communicate to an audience, while social media is about interactive discussion. She continued that, as email marketers, we tend to listen to customers and target our campaigns but in the end we are usually broadcasting or narrowcasting messages to specific audiences, rather than interactively communicating with customers like we do on Facebook or Twitter.
Even though marketing has been in existence since the ancient days, email marketing could be described as the most sophisticated easy way of communicating with customers and could easily reach millions of customers in a blink of an eye. It is a tool that businesses cannot ignore which has placed successful entities to where they are today. However, there is no guarantee of success in this media; success comes with the application which has to be strategic and authentic. While acknowledging email marketing and social media as an indispensable tool, the CEO of Britefire Marketing, Godfrey Parkin analysed why both media should be incorporated and effectively activated in every business. He further informed that e-marketing is no longer about websites, it is about relationships. Markets are conversations he said, listing the 10 rules businesses should consider when applying e-marketing:
- Listen: Monitor what customers, the industry and competitors are saying, invite comments and seek to understand social needs.
- Be customer centric: Don’t target segments, target personas. A business won’t succeed in social media until they stop using it to their advantage and start using it to their customer’s advantage instead understand what matters to them and provide generously.
- Be strategic: Know your purpose, understand the current reality, focus on priorities and set clear business objectives then define a social strategy and put together a plan.
- Be authentic and generous: Don’t outsource conversation-if you’re not willing to talk to customers, don’t expect them to engage. Give information generously; be responsive and respectful.
- Be engaging and interesting: Be a host, a conversationalist. Identify influencers and get to know them, be ready for real time engagement.
- Invest in resources: Social networking is not cheap as it requires continuous effort from a person or team. It also requires investment in set-up phase and should have a budget.
- Encourage experience, sharing and responding! : Ask, share, reward and facilitate. Don’t get defensive but view criticism as an opportunity to build relationships and reputation.
- Use a multichannel approach: Create more than one web page for your businesses, customise sub-pages, interlink everything all sites to each other.
- Be search engine aware: 8 out of 10 online transactions start with a Google search, make all social content easily found. Are the business pages Google optimised?
- Monitor, test and always improve.
Even though some might argue that email marketing has always been social, the key issue is, how best to integrate this to increase customer satisfaction while making profit for businesses. Just as the daily weather changes, email marketing and social media evolve and a business could only succeed if it keeps up with these challenges of change while engaging in this media.
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