What's the Fuss About Email Marketing?
Come with me on a mini trip to Zanzibar.
Ready?
Here we are at Nungwi, relaxing and catching up on our childhood days in Africa. Some of us grew up in Nigeria, others in Kenya and some in Ghana. We talk about our “unknown” escapades and share nostalgic memories. One person from our tight clique was unable to make the trip.
Tiffany Haddish & Regina Hall | Movie: Girls’s Trip
Her boss had an emergency trip and being next in command, she had no choice but to stay back and hold the forte for him. She was really looking forward to the experience. The idea of taking a girls trip to Zanzibar was all her idea.
Sad she couldn’t make it.
Ah well! She wanted us to keep her updated with pictures, so she didn’t feel so bad. On our way back, we spot a business center in the lobby of our hotel that allows us to use the internet at about 10 cents per minute. We get so excited and scream “Cindy!” and immediately we all have the same thought to her send pictures.
We connect our ever faithful travel buddy Sony Cyber-shot to the PC, upload our pictures to Corrine’s gmail and hit send. 80 cents later, we leave the business center feeling accomplished.
For the next 4 days we’re in Zanzibar, we stop by the business center to keep Cindy engaged.
We return to Toronto and Cindy’s waiting at the airport to pick us up. The first thing she says is, “Ladiessssss”, followed by “OMG! Was Zanzibar amazing or what?…don’t even get me started on…”
From the way Cindy spoke, you’d think she went on the trip with “US”. That’s the general idea. Email marketing allows you to keep your customers in the loop. This loop is how you build your tribe, brand loyalty, trust and awareness. It allows you to provide more detailed insight into ongoing activities, new products, progress reports etc.
For a second put yourself in the customers’ position. Imagine...You want to buy a new property so you follow a bunch of property websites awaiting new releases, but for some reason, you always seemed to be out of luck. Whenever you revisited the sites and called their phone numbers you were told that the properties you saw barely 10 mins ago were all sold out. “What? Who’s buying them all?” How come you keep missing out?
At this point, you’d want to be a part of the inner circle that is privy to insider information. Wouldn’t you? When people see benefit in your product or service, they would want to be a part of what you’re doing, so don’t ever feel like you’d be bombarding them. Leave them with an option to join the community and put effort in providing value to that community. This provides convenience, saves time and effort that might typically be spent on research. It’s a win for them.
Email Marketing keeps your customers in the loop, making it a great way to build relationship.
Email is still one of the most widely used communication tools in the world and according to Statista, we should expect the number of global e-mail users to grow from 3.9 billion to 4.48 billion users in 2024. This is more than half the world’s population and most definitely way more than the number of people active on social media.
In this example, it cost the ladies a few cents to send an email to Cindy, but generally speaking, email is often free for the most part. When compared against other forms of advertising, it provides relatively higher ROI at an average of $42 for every dollar spent.
Perhaps the coolest thing for me is that its your closest connection to your customer. Think about it this way - you have their (email) addresses. This means that you know where they live (online). It’s quite similar to having your friends address and being able to pop by for a chat when you’re in the neighbourhood. Hey, just like popping by a friends house a million times a day could become annoying, so is popping into people’s mailboxes endlessly and just like giving out your friends address to strangers is an invasion of privacy, so is selling your email lists. Your customers trusted you with it, so don’t betray that trust by giving out their private information. YES! EMAIL IS PRIVATE INFORMATION.
While we’re on the topic of email etiquette, I recently called up an organization to unsubscribe from all their offerings, because they were bombarding me non-stop and they only way to get rid of them was to give them a call. Can you just imagine my frustration? I couldn’t just hit an unsubscribe link and get this - I could only unsubscribe on weekdays between 9am and 5pm. Here I was wanting to stop the automated emails on a Friday evening. It was such a terror. When I finally got through the next week, I had no patience for questions like, “Could you please tell me why you want to leave us?”. My response, PLEASE UNSUBSCRIBE ME NOW! At this point, I didn’t care about their value-based emails, I just wanted the bombardment to stop so I could regain my peace of mind.
“Don’t hold your customers in bondage for trusting you.”
With that in mind, know that there are anti-spam laws in place in many countries to guard against misuse of people’s emails. Do not misuse the opportunity that email marketing provides by spamming people with “insider information”. Provide the option to opt-in and opt-out. It is your customers’ right. Failing to do so could result in unwanted fines.
The idea is to build a community of people who want to be your friend and remain aware of what your brand is up to. Building a customer base of people who are uninterested is expelling energy that could be put to better use in other business growth projects.
Not sure how to implement email marketing? Check out a few cool email marketing campaigns here
When it comes to implementing email marketing, I’ve become quite familiar with Mailchimp, but feel free to try different ones so you know which what’s best for you. Here’s a list of some common ones.
All the Best!
