A world without social media? No more Facebook or Instagram? It’s doubtful, but the recent social outage that caused these giant social networks to go offline for many hours has instilled a sense of fear in many. It impacted everyone, from influencers that require the platforms to work to small business owners that rely on it to generate sales, including the granny who couldn’t send out her regular inspirational evening broadcast.
So, what are the chances of this happening again? No one knows. We think it’s somewhat unlikely to occur in the near future, but it’s still a possibility. What happens when your business can’t leverage the social networks it uses for marketing and customer engagement?
Email marketing is one of the top ways to reach your audience
Before social media was a thing, companies relied heavily on email marketing. Building a customer database was and is a core part of their marketing strategy. Fast forward almost two decades, and things should still be the same.
Email marketing is an incredibly powerful tool and one of the best ways to reach your customers directly. Do you know how many dollar bills have left my account because Superbalist sent me a 35% voucher at 10 pm? Much more than I would like to admit.
According to HubSpot, 40% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success, and 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email. Furthermore, 99% of consumers check their email every day and it is by far the preferred way to receive updates from brands. As marketers, we can’t ignore these statistics. That’s why it’s important to develop a strong email marketing strategy.
During a social media blackout (I feel like that should be a swear word), the best and probably the only way to reach your customers is via email marketing. Brands took advantage of this time by increasing their mailers, knowing fully well that their customers were probably checking their phones every minute. Did they lose sales because their social ads were stopped? Most definitely! Could they still market to their customers? Yes!
Can you say the same for your business? Can you still reach your customers without Facebook or Instagram?
Building an email list is powerful, and it’s not that difficult to do. We work with so many brands monthly to develop email marketing strategies to grow their marketing databases (legally). We also help put together their monthly or weekly mailers with minimal input from the company.
Whether you need help growing your current databases, require strategic input on your email marketing campaigns, or simply need to get started with email marketing, get in touch with us.
