Let’s face it. While social media is the trendy new marketing kid on the block, email remains the channel that most companies rely upon to execute their direct marketing programs. Why?
- Email is easy and inexpensive.
- Social media is new and time-consuming.
Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that since email is cheap, there’s no harm in blasting the whole database with the same message. Yet this strategy produces an unhealthy syndrome called list fatigue. Without a strategy for sending the most relevant messages to the most targeted customers, your emails can begin to be perceived as irrelevant and your customers stop opening them. If your customers shut down your only touch point, you lose your ability to communicate with them and increase the likelihood of losing them. Not good.
This is where social media can play the hero. Social networks give you another channel in which to get your customer’s attention. By making the effort to maintain social network contact information on your database, consider the power of what you can do:
- Best customers: Show them that you care by acknowledging them in a social relationship.
- New customers: Get the relationship off to the most promising start by welcoming them to a social relationship.
- Lapsed customers: Seize the opportunity to re-engage those who are no longer responding to your emails.
Are you thinking this sounds too time-consuming and something you can’t afford? Think about it this way. Back in the day direct marketers spent tons of money on four-color printing on high quality paper. But they didn’t mail these expensive pieces to everyone. They only invested in the people they predicted were most likely to buy or those they sorely did not want to lose.
This is the kind of science that now needs to be applied to social media marketing. How prepared are you?
