Despite the rise in social media offering more ways to communicate with your target market than ever before, email marketing still should play an important role in a marketing strategy to Find More Customers and Nurture the ones you already have.
Email is considered a primary method of communication and that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. According to The Email Statistics Report, 2018-2022 that The Radicati Group produced, "In 2018, the total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day will exceed 281 billion and is forecast to grow to over 333 billion by year-end 2022."
As I mentioned in my blog post "Keep your website visitors coming back", email marketing allows you to provide a personalised message that will generally remain accessible for the intended recipient to view well after you initially sent it, which is really important for those people that are just too busy to keep on top of everything all the time (which happens to be most people). Social Media on the other hand is somewhat reliant on a bit of luck from a timing perspective that the person happens to be scrolling through their news feed not too long after your post, unless of course they are actively searching for your company or something that you have mentioned in your post.
There are a lot of email marketing tools out there these days, and a large portion of business are now using them, however, I am often surprised at the effort marketers regularly go through to get the recipients into the tool, get leads from the campaign out to sales people and deliver meaningful reports to management. This usually entails a lot of manually importing and exporting data as well as manual intervention for lead distribution, and a whole lot of assumptions being made related to to the correlation of an initial marketing campaign in a closed deal, which often results in a disjointed relationship between sales and marketing.
At Customer Consulting Group we implement email marketing tools that are integrated with your CRM. This removed the need to manually import and export data, and the analytics to show if the email has been delivered, opened are displayed right within the contact or lead record in your CRM along with information to let you know if they clicked on a link within the email. In addition, lead distribution can be automated and once the deal is done, the email marketing campaign can be easily associated with the opportunity to give you a far more accurate Return on Marking Investment (ROMI).