Email Marketing or Social Media Marketing?

In a new era of social media (Twitter, Facebook and many others) and various forms of instant text messaging (SMS, WhatsApp and more) business owners may be forgiven for wondering if email is still useful for getting their product or service in front of their prospects!

A recent UK poll (by Conlumino) is reported to have found the following: only 2.5% of the respondents preferred social media to deliver marketing messages to them. More than 60% preferred good old email!

So, if you want to get started with email marketing, here are the first crucial steps to take:

1. Get comfortable with the fact that you will need to offer some valuable free advice, or a free report to get your site visitors to sign up for your email newsletters. Remember that this will be a long term relationship - your subscribers will be unlikely to buy anything from you straight away!

2. Set up a form that automatically captures their details and sends them a thank you email, along with their free report. A 3rd party email marketing service makes this a snap!

3. Make sure subscribers understand what they will be receiving in return for their contact details, and that you will contact them from time to time with special offers.

4. It is a well established marketing fact that it takes quite a few emails to build up enough trust and offer enough opportunity to get a subscriber to take action. Therefore it makes a lot of sense to use an autoresponder service to set up a series of automated followup messages to new subscribers.

5. Contact your list regularly with valuable information to build longer term trust. Your list can become one of your most valuable assets!