Is Email Marketing.....

I've had a few things happen recently that I found instructive.....

I had to get some new ink cartridges for my printer.  I went to a major, nation-wide office supply store, and at the checkout the young lady behind the counter informed me that if I signed up for a free store discount card that I would get an instant 10% discount of my purchase that day.  In filling out the little application, I found that, in addition to my name, address, and phone number, they also requested my email address.

Last weekend, at Sears, while finalizing my purchase for some shirts, the clerk asked me for my email address so she could add it to my information in their computer database.

A few months ago I bought a new car at my local Toyota dealer.  In filling out the reams of paperwork, my email address was one of the many items they asked for.

Upon purchasing my last computer at Best Buy earlier this year, my email address was one of the (non-optional) items of information I was required to supply.

When I recently signed up for my "Discount Membership Card" at the local Sheetz Kwik Shopper (I get every tenth cup of coffee free and 3 cents off each gallon of gas -WHOOPEE!) they wanted my email address.

Last night I ordered a pizza from Dominoes over the Internet (large, meat-lovers).  In addition to my name, address, credit card info, and phone number, they also wanted - you guessed it - my email address.

The same thing may have been happening to you, as well.  Although it's so common anymore you may not have even noticed it.  And if you have ordered virtually ANYTHING online you know you have to give 'em your email address!

Most retailers are now asking for your email address!

They use this information to inform you of time-sensitive deals, specials, and sales.  It's a "standard operating procedure" anymore for both brick-and-mortar and online stores to increase their sales withOUT you going to the store.

But what I DON'T understand is this:
Although ALL of these merchants asked
me for my email address.....
.....not ONE asked me for my Twitter account
or my Facebook info!

And yet.....

When I signed up for my Facebook account, they required my email address.

When I signed up for my Twitter account, they required my email address.

When I signed up for my LinkedIn account, they required my email address.

When I signed up for my Pinterest account, they required my email address.

When I signed up for my Google+ account, they required my email address.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

If we are to believe the "next shiny thing" hawkers, email marketing is dead - supposedly it's "social media" that is the wave of the future.  But, although ALL of the offline retailers required my email address, NONE required my social media information!  In fact ALL of the social media sites required my email address in order to sign up for an account!

Does anyone think that maybe, just MAYBE, these corporate giants know what the really IMPORTANT information is for MARKETING PURPOSES - NOT the number of "followers" we have, or the number of "likes" we have, but that activity that puts M-O-N-E-Y in our pockets!?

So, what’s going on? Is email alive or dead?  Let's just see.....

First of all, let me say this:  It's not really fair to try to compare Email Marketing with Social Media Marketing.

It's like trying to compare apples to oranges, or even apples to tennis balls.  Email and Social Media are two completely different animals meant to accomplish two completely different things.  However, as it is with ANY "bright, new shiny thing" on the Internet, there will always be those fast-buck artists that make unsubstantiated claims in order to sell that course about, "How to Make A Million Dollars on Facebook," or "How to Retire in Three Weeks with Twitter."

I know, I know - how dare I have the audacity to hate on social media?  It’s the way of the future!  It will solve world hunger!  It will have your babies.!

And very soon, it will even make your decaf soy latte in the morning.  (LOL)

Don’t get me wrong.  Social media is great, and it can be used in marketing.  Social media can be used to initiate communication and to begin the process of email marketing.  But it simply cannot REPLACE email marketing.  In fact, the reverse is true:  the main thrust of social media marketing is to capture email addresses!  All other things being equal, email marketing still crushes social media marketing. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. SIMPLE NUMBERS

Did you know that email has nearly three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined?  As of 2014, there are nearly 3.9 billion email accounts worldwide, with that number expected to increase to 4.9 billion by the end of 2017. (Source: The Radicati Group)

As you can see by the chart below, email useage has been steadily increasing in the last few years, while Facebok and Twitter useage has nearly reached a stagnation point.

It's not hard to understand why:  When someone gets a computer, they MAY join Facebook or Twitter, but the very first thing they ALL do is to..... SETUP AN EMAIL ACCOUNT!

In fact, if you imagine a full cup of rice is the number of emails sent every day, then by comparison, all the daily posts on Facebook would make a miserable 10 grains—barely enough to pick up with a chopstick. And all the tweets sent every day would be a measly 4 grains. In fact, Facebook and Twitter combined make up just 0.2% of the number of emails sent each day.

(And the above numbers do NOT even include include spam emails.)

By the same token, every web search made on every search engine every day equals just 1/100th of daily email traffic; and all the pages viewed on the entire web each day—including images and videos—use only a quarter of the bandwidth consumed by email.

Many marketers are so busy chasing the latest baubles and magic
bullets that they haven’t got a clue about all this!

After all, what’s old is dead, right?  So email, being older than dirt in internet terms, must be deader than anything.

"No one uses it any more" - you hear it being said or, more often, "I tried but it didn’t work."

But to SUCCESSFUL marketers, email is not just essential to their business efforts, but foundational to their marketing and sales systems.

Quality vs. Quantity

Okay, you may be thinking, sure, email has heaps of users. It’s got major "traffic" compared to social media channels. But so what? It’s not like traffic alone means anything. A small amount of precisely-targeted marketing aimed at high-quality traffic will nail much larger amounts than that of shotgun pellets sprayed willy-nilly.

Absolutely right. If that’s what you were thinking, you’re well on your way to being a better marketer than most "experts." So let me tell you the good news:

.....email C-R-U-S-H-E-S social media for quality of traffic as well as quantity.

Here’s why:

2. EMAIL IS THE MOST PERSONAL MEDIUM

"Oh," I hear you muttering.  "Facebook.  Facebook is the more personal, Stan."

No, no it ain’t.

First of all, refer back to item 1: simple numbers. A lot of people simply don’t use Facebook.

But secondly, in the vast majority of cases, business-minded people do not go to Facebook for private, 1-on-1 conversations. (Maybe teenyboppers do, and if you’re in that market niche and want to try marketing to them using Facebook’s private message feature, good luck with that.)  Business people like us, fellow Big Dogs, open Gmail or Outlook or whatever, and bang out an email.

Email is the first, best social media channel.
And that is the power WE want to tap!

3. EMAIL IS THE MOST "BUSINESSY" MEDIUM

Yes, some businesses do use Facebook or Twitter or Google Plus for communicating with various people. But when it comes to building business relationships and communicating with partners and clients, the most "serious," "grown-up" medium is email.

A recent study concluded that email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter. (Source: McKinsey & Company)

44% of consumers made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email they received. (Source: Convince and Convert)

When asked which medium consumers would like to receive updates from, 90% preferred an email newsletter, while only 10% chose Facebook. (Source: Nielsen Norman Group)

Email conversion rates are three times higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion. (Source: McKinsey & Company)

48% of consumers say that they prefer to communicate with brands via email. (Source: Direct Marketing News)

So the question I’d like to pose is simple: would you rather use a single marketing channel to talk to all your customers in the most professional way possible…or divide your energy between multiple different channels to talk to only some of them in ways that don’t have that professional gloss?

(Now remember, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use those other channels. Just that you shouldn’t use them before email. Here’s another reason why not:)

4. EMAIL GETS WAY MORE ATTENTION PER CUSTOMER THAN ANYTHING ELSE

Very simply, you’re more likely to get "face time" with your prospects if you use email.  This isn’t necessarily because your customers spend more time with email than on Facebook or searching Google or whatever - although they might.

Rather, it’s because email allows you to make repeated contact, and that contact is “invasive”. It’s in their mailbox - their inner electronic sanctum. That’s very different from sending out a tweet or posting something on Facebook, where they may or may not see it, because it’s just part of a much larger timeline featuring hundreds of other people.

In that situation, you’re easily missed if you don’t hit just the right window (which often differs per person).

But in even the most badly-managed inbox, your message is still there, waiting for their attention. It doesn’t just go away.

So provided you say things worth reading, your customers will give you minutes of a time each day. Minutes are like dog years on the internet.

And the more worth reading you are, the more your customers actually start to look forward to your messages. Indeed, research shows that most people open email from a maximum of 16 "trusted advisers" - and they almost always open these emails. If you can get into this inner circle, you get undivided attention.

5. EMAIL IS A "TRANSACTIONAL" MEDIUM

What I mean by this is simply that customers already expect to get offers by email, and to buy things through email. So they not only have a high tolerance for offers, but they’re actually more likely to be in a buying frame of mind. They’re primed.

For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25. (Source: emailexpert)

AND,,,,, When marketed through email, consumers spend 138% more than people who don’t receive email offers. (Source: Convince and Convert)

Compare this to Facebook, where your customers are really just there to chat with their friends, see the latest cute cat videos, and play Farmville. Even if they like you, that’s a lousy environment for marketing isn’t it? Or Twitter, where people are in the habit of finding interesting things to share, or catch up with the people they follow - but very seldom are looking to buy anything.

With email, you can "train" your customers to expect offers while simultaneously teaching them about your value, day in and day out. This means they begin to not only expect offers from you, but to desire them (at least some of them). And because of the ability to make effectively unlimited contacts, you are infinitely more likely to catch them at time when they’re ready to buy (which is one of the most important rules of sales).

To summarize, email simply has the nut hand at the marketing poker table.

Facebook and Twitter are channels used by far fewer customers, for frivolous, non-business and non-transactional things. Marketing messages get less attention per customer than email, and they fail to establish as personal a connection either.

*          *           *

Notice that each social media channel gives "registered" users and "active" users.  What  is the difference?  "Registered" users is the TOTAL number of users registered since that site went online;  "active" users is the number of users who accessed the site..... once in the last MONTH!  (Obviously, many folks who register on these sites either  - or very seldom - never go back to 'em.)

On the other hand, an astounding 91% of email users check their email..... once a day!  And generally, this is the very first action they take when they log on.

In order to show this in action, influential marketing blogger Derek Halpern ran a test where he sent his latest blog post to the same number of people via both email and Twitter. Here are the results:

300 people clicked through to the article from Twitter
4,200 (!!!) people clicked through to the article from email

But is it easier to build a social media following than an email list?

While it’s clear email has a much better engagement and response rate than social media, you may be thinking that it’s much more difficult to get people to give you permission to email them as opposed to get them to become a fan on Facebook or become a follower on Twitter.

But that’s not the case.

Derek Halpern did a second test to see which would be harder: getting people to subscribe to his email list, or getting people to follow him on Twitter. You would naturally think people are more likely to click a follow button on Twitter than give up their email address.

But you would be mistaken.

In his experiment, Derek sent 1,000 visitors to his email opt-in page, and 1,000 visitors to his Twitter page. The results? He received almost 500 new email subscribers, making it a conversion rate of almost 50%. The number of Twitter followers he gained:  less than 100!

It all boils down to these three words: return on investment.

Let’s open this portion with a killer statistic - the Direct Marketing Association found that email marketing has a ROI of 4300%. Monetate’s Ecommerce Quarterly also showed that email drove more conversions than other marketing channels, including search and social.

While the above chart promotes email marketing as the winner, I don’t believe there should be a winner.  Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing are two types of mediums with very different opportunities.

So here's the bottom line, sports fans.....

So-called "old-school" email marketing is a push medium where a marketer can send a message to a recipient when they’d like to.  Social is a pull medium where you put the message out and hope that someone reads and responds.

Think about it this way:  You go into a new car lot to purchase a car.  One (old-school) salesman comes out to the lot to greet you, assist you, and answer any questions.  (This is "push marketing")  Another salesman just sits in his office waiting for YOU to come to HIM.  (This is "pull marketing")

Which salesman do you think will make more money?

Hitting someone in the nose with a brick may be "old-school".....

.....but it DOES get their attention!

With the Big Dogs program, we take great pride in presenting you with an unparalleled opportunity.  It's an unparalleled opportunity to have a staggering number of qualified prospects handed to you on a monthly basis, and to acquire an above average income that comes to you on an on-going, recurring basis!

All YOU have to do is to reach out and grab hold of the comet's tail.  Otherwise.....

"Step aside and let the BIG Dogs eat!"

(And if you don't ALREADY have your copy of "Secrets of the Big Dogs"
you can pick it up at the link directly below:)
http://BigDogSecrets.com

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