I remember having a conversation with someone in the IT world back when I started The Bright Click in 2012, who told me that email would be 'dead within a couple of years'.
He was basing this hypothesis on the rise of instant messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and at the time I could see where he was potentially coming from.
Pretty much all technology evolves in a similar way - telephones evolved into mobile phones which quickly became smartphones.
VHS evolved into DVD which quickly became streaming platforms.
However email has remained surprisingly the same since its invention (which believe it or not was over fifty years ago!) and it would appear is going nowhere soon - most of us are using it daily for work and most likely have two, three or even more accounts registered on a personal level.
There's also a general school of thought that email marketing doesn't work - but it does - and I'd like to give you a couple of examples around why, and it how it could potentially benefit your business too.
Last week, I sent an email out discussing the merits of Frequently Asked Questions and ensuring your website had this covered, and it got a brilliant response.
We're working on a few welcome sequences for clients now as a result of that one email, which was simply designed to offer some help and advice on why this is important.
Around six months ago, I received a reply to a similar email asking if I'd like to quote for a new website. The wonderful thing about this particular reply was that I hadn't spoken to this person for about ten years, but she'd remained on our mailing list and had enjoyed the value-based content we'd been sending.
Once she was in a position to use our services, she knew exactly how to find us and the website is due to go live imminently!
Being absolutely candid, our goal via email marketing is to stay in touch with our audience and offer as much value as we can along the way.
Occasionally we'll have an offer or two (watch this space!) but we'll only ever tag this onto something that we'd hope you find of value in the first place - we've never been here for the hard sell and we never will be.
If it's helpful for you to know, we segment our data into simple lists as follows:
Clients | Lapsed Clients | Leads | Enquired But Didn't Buy
Strategic Partners | Suppliers | Other
This allows us to tailor specific emails to specific audiences as and when we need to and has been really successful for us - we get a response of some type to pretty much every email we send. We're now into the habit of sending one email per week, every Thursday, and doubling this up as blog and social content for good measure.
Wondering what you can write about? Use Chat GPT to generate you some ideas (just don't use it to write the email itself, you're better than that 😉).
Need some more help or advice - drop us a line here!