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Let's talk about email marketing.
The first question everyone has in their head is: is it worth it? Is email dead? So many people are overwhelmed by spam; should I actually bother?
The answer is, yes, there’s no question about it. The reason why you should still be interested in email marketing, and why you should care about it and seriously spend some time on it, is because no matter how many followers you have on social media, they don't belong to you. You can have your Facebook page shut down in an instant. You can have your Instagram account shut down in an instant. None of these people belong to you. You won't be able to store them somewhere outside because they belong to Facebook's or Instagram's or Pinterest's or whatever's database.
You want to have email addresses that are basically yours when people give you their email address in exchange for value, which would be your email opt-in. That’s why it is absolutely crucial that you still invest your time in email marketing.
- Email marketing is unique in terms of how you can promote, versus social media.
- Social media has not been developed to be a marketing platform. It is now cleverly being used as such by online businesses, but that was not the purpose of its creation. The purpose was to have people connect with each other and stay in touch, and to just see what’s going on with everyone and exchange news, and that hasn't changed.
- If you can promote on social media, I do encourage you to do that in a way that doesn't feel salesy or pushy, but with integrity and with elegance. That's totally fine. But the expectations of people who check out your feed is that you’re coming from a place of service. They just want to check on your news rather than be promoted to, and a lot of people don't like it if you try to sell to them.
With email, it's different. When people sign up to your email list, or your newsletter, or your roundup, or whatever you want to call it, they know in advance that you will promote to them from time to time. Actually, you should tell them when they sign up to your email list that they will sometimes get news and promotions, so it should be really clear to them what will happen when they sign up.
This is good, because some people will be like, “No, I can’t be bothered,” and they won’t sign up, which also means that the chances that they would ever convert into a client of yours are minimal. Instead, you’ll have people who say, “Yes, I can live with that. I'm interested in that,” who are open to your marketing and promotions, and they are much more likely to take the next step of buying from you.
It's a completely different way of talking to these people, and you don't need to feel weird or salesy when you full-on promote something because those are people who have already raised their hands in terms of wanting to work with you.
I hope that makes sense and helps you to understand why email marketing is still so important today, even with social media platforms.
I really encourage you to spend some time looking into what value you can give to people in exchange for their email address, because these days we get so much spam that people are more reluctant to give away their email addresses, or they have a spam email address that they never check. You want them to give you their best email address, so the opt-in, the freebie, or the free gift, whatever you may call it, has to have some value.
Check out the free guide below on how to create that opt-in containing concrete steps with questions for you to ask about what that freebie could be so that you’ll have an easier time collecting those email addresses from people who are more inclined to actually work with you. For more business tips, check out my blog page, and don't forget to have a look at the different masterclasses.
I hope this was helpful, and I'll talk to you soon.
