In March 2018, the Radicati Group estimated the number of email accounts worldwide to be 3.8 billion. Even more interesting is the number of consumer and business emails sent per day is more than 281 billion. Wow! That sure is a lot of email.
Smart Phones Rock
No matter the age of your target market, email marketing is still the best method to stay in touch with your customers. Of particular interest, is the increase in mobile users. Of the 1 billion Gmail users, 75% of them are now using smart phones to check their email inbox.
Business professionals can no longer afford to ignore mobile email marketing. If you are not formatting your emails to look good on a smart phone, you are making a big mistake. If your email subscribers have difficulty reading your emails – they will just hit the DELETE button.
Which email would you rather read?
Always remember to check how your
font size displays on mobile.
Email Marketing vs Social Media
You may be wondering how email compares to social media? It turns out that most people consider email to be more important. While you can go a few days without checking Facebook or Twitter, most people are checking their email inbox several times a day.
Did you know recently that Google pulled the plug on Google+, a direct competitor to Facebook? As a result of a security breach, the folks at Google decided it was easier to dump the not so popular platform. For anyone who had developed a large social following, in one fell swoop they will lose a means of communicating with their audience.
This is why we always say that social media platforms are like building a house on rented land. Your access to that audience is only possible as long the platform exists.
The best feature of email marketing is that regardless of which program you use, you own your list of subscribers. You can take that list of contacts and export from one program and import it to another.
Don’t Resist the List
When we first launched our business, we did so much homework. We met with business coaches, devised a marketing plan, completed entrepreneurial courses, attended various marketing workshops and seminars, participated in countless webinars, and read a ton of books.
We learned that building an email list of all your existing and prospective customers is critical to building your business. Sounds like great advice, but who had time for that? Not us.
Instead, we focused all of our time on building the infrastructure of our business. There was so much to do when we were launching. Incorporate our business. Set up a bank account. Build a website. Set up social media platforms. Create all the products and services we planned to market.
Once we realized that resisting the list was hurting our marketing efforts, we called a major timeout. Instead of resisting the list – we embraced the list. We learned all about the different email marketing programs out there to determine which one worked best for us. While I am glad that we finally made the decision to bite the bullet and learn all about email marketing, I just wish we had started earlier.
Building your list should be at the top of your To Do list. Instead of focusing on WHAT products or services you are going to package/sell, it’s better to think about WHO you want to sell to and HOW you’ll communicate with them on a consistent basis. Set a goal to learn the basics of email marketing first and then follow up with a plan on how email marketing can work for you.
For anyone that has already launched your business, it’s imperative to know it’s never too late to build an email list. Start today, right where you are. The important thing is to just – start.
If you’d like some tips on how to build an email list, I encourage you to check out: How To Create a Killer Email List From Thin Air. In this beginner’s guide, internet marketing guru, Neil Patel, provides tips on how to build your email list from scratch.
