Before the rise of social media, email marketing was the only way to reach people who had shown enough of an interest in a business to visit the website but weren’t yet interested enough to make a purchase. Persuade those people to leave behind an email address and the company could return to them with a special offer or news of a product release and pull them back through the door.
Since social media?
Well, all of those things are still true.
Social media’s strength is that it allows marketers to access prospects all the time. It lets them respond to their comments and posts, entering into the kind of dialogue that email marketing just can’t replicate. Lists (on Twitter and Facebook) and Circles (on Google+) let them target their messages, and social media has a much greater potential to send a brand viral than email marketing.
But those messages are often overlooked. While an email sits in an inbox until it’s opened, a tweet quickly disappears down a stream.
And while a Facebook page can generate lots of likes, the number of fans they collect is often smaller (and harder to convert) than the number of email addresses the company is able to collect.
Continue reading ‘What Social Media Can Do For Your Email Marketing’
