Ah email, our old friend.
The home of:
FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: THIS WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH LOL
And of course, the classic:
$11m UGANDAN LOTTERY WINNER – CONGRATULATIONS!
With the hotly anticipated improved Facebook message application being gradually implemented, many experts are predicting the beginning of the end for email as we know it.
People are moving more towards wanting everything in one place, and Facebook makes perfect sense for this as the majority of people that you know are (or will eventually be) on Facebook, as are an ever-increasing number of businesses.
With the advent of Facebook Places, you will easily be able to see where your friends are, and even if they are online before emailing them, creating a fully interactive messaging system that would leave Outlook looking like an ancient relic.
However, don’t write email off just yet, it still has a large part to play in how we communicate and how we do business – in particular, how we engage with our clients and customers.
Here are five ways that email remains vital:
1) You can drive people to your website. In my last blog post I talked about the importance of not only having a website, but also in what you use to get people to look at it. A regular email update is one way of doing this, which also leads me onto…
2) You can incentivize people to engage with you using social media. A simple ‘Follow Us On Facebook’ button is great. However a competition that incentivizes all new Twitter /Facebook followers can be really effective. A client I have recently worked with gave away a fabulous prize to one of their Twitter followers once they had reached 1000. They went from 800 to 1000 in no time at all. Using email to encourage your clients to follow you can be just as effective.
3) Get your blog out there! Email the opening paragraph of your most recent blog to your clients and encourage them to ‘click here’ to read the rest – this is much more interesting to your clients than a ‘newsletter’ heading and drives traffic to your blog / website to boot.
4) Even better – you can take your website to the people! A decent email template can contain much of the same links that you already have on your website navigation – you just need to provide fresh content as the main ‘story’.
5) It’s better to be in touch than not to be. Many of your customers are used to being contacted by email, and while the ultimate switch to Social Media is a gradual transition, email remains a tried and tested way of communicating, and if you can link to Social Media platforms and your website at the same time you can have the best of all worlds!
So are you sending regular updates to your customers? How do you inform your clients of promotions or special offers? How do you drive people to your website? Drop me a line and let me know… an email is fine 🙂
matt@thebrightclick.co.uk