Do you ask customers for their email address?
If collecting emails seems like hard work, here’s a re-cap on why email marketing is worthwhile.
5 reasons why email marketing rocks:
1. It’s the golden ticket
Websites, Apps and Social Media platforms may come and go, but email isn’t going anywhere. The entire internet is built on the premise that individuals have an email address – and this piece of info is your golden ticket to reaching them in their home, at their work and in their hand.
2. It’s direct
These days you can’t rely on customers going out of their way to contact you. Customers are busy, so a gentle reminder that you exist can often be the nudge they need – especially if they’ve been already been thinking about contacting you.
3. It’s yours
Who owns your Linkedin connections? Linkedin do.
Who owns your Facebook fans? Facebook do.
Rather than renting your audience from a social media juggernaut, build your own list that you can access when you choose.
4. It’s repeat business
The customer that purchased from you yesterday went out of their way to do so. Are you going to let them walk off into the sunset in the hope that they’ll return one day? Or are you going to keep in touch and explain why it’s worth coming back?
5. It’s low cost
Whatever sales/marketing blog you read, they all conclude that email marketing is still the best performing medium in terms of return on investment (ROI).
Here are a couple of articles on the subject if you’re interested (just to prove I’m not fibbing!)
Still not collecting email addresses?
Forget your ‘dog ate my homework‘ excuse and get cracking.
Yes it takes time to build an email list – but you’ve got the start somewhere!
7 ways to collect email addresses from your customers.
- Run a competition where the winner is announced by email
- Use a CRM to automatically collect email addresses (I use Capsule CRM)
- Start a business card draw
- Add an email newsletter signup form to your website
- Add ’email’ as a field on your new customer or account application form
- Incentivise your staff to collect them (I’m talking rewards!)
- Build email into your business process (for example, appointment reminders via email)
Use, don’t abuse!
Yes, having your customers email address is awesome. But if you’re going to ram sales messages down your customers throat then you might as well not bother at all. For more on this topic, see my recent selling vs helping article.
As François-Marie Arouet once said, “With great power comes great responsibility”
Happy emailing!
Cheers, Dan
