Email has been around since before the Worldwide web and is one of the founding technologies of the Internet at large. And while common complaints are that we all get too much email we still use it every day.

So how can email help your business today?

YES YOU CAN TEACH AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS

Well, we’re not going to get into all the basics about when to send emails, optin lists, SPAM rules and the types of emails to send, but we are going to repeat one of the basic rules of Internet marketing and that’s this: the money’s in the list. Still.

Studies continue to show that email subscribers are more engaged with the products, services and companies that they’re subscribed to. What does that mean? It means that if you have an existing relationship of some kind with a customer, client or prospect, they are still more likely to read or at least glance at your message then almost any other form of digital marketing or even it’s much more expensive relative, direct mail.

So I’m also not going to get into statistics about open rates and click through rates which is a topic for a whole other article.

But while it’s safe to say that email is not the end-all be-all and you have to work harder and smarter today then ever before to make email marketing effective, it has evolved as a trusty companion to more trendy Internet marketing techniques such as social media, video and content marketing in general.

COMBINING EMAIL MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA – PERFECT TOGETHER!

In fact, one of the biggest developments in email marketing in recent years has been the integration with social media which is what we’ll be focusing on in this article.

While all the major email marketing companies offer some variation of these services we’re going to focus on the two email marketing services we use and thereby are the most familiar with: Aweber and iContact.

Both services offer an easy way to add social media links within the body of the email message. This makes it easy for readers to share your content, which is key.

They also offer the ability to post directly to your own social media properties such as Facebook and Twitter and clients can even subscribe to your blog posts that are delivered via email.

And another way email has evolved is that all modern day email services now publish your emails to an actual archived landing page so that you can link to this page it and share it like any other webpage and it’s another way to give yourself an inbound link.

BEWARE FACEBOOK “LIKES”

One of my biggest criticisms of Facebook as a marketing platform is that you don’t “own” your own likes — Facebook does!

And with the recent controversy over Facebook’s new formula for deciding what your own followers on Facebook will see, I recommend using Facebook not for gathering as many likes as you can but for gathering your own opt-in email subscribers.

You can do this by adding an email signup form to a custom tab on your Facebook page and encouraging followers to sign up there.

I like to say that the difference between getting likes on Facebook or email subscribers is the difference between owning your own house or renting it.

Facebook owns all the visitors to your Facebook page unless you can get them to become your own prospects by getting them to sign up for your own newsletter.

Is it more difficult to get an email sign up than a “like”? Absolutely.

But I would rather have 10 quality opt-in email subscribers than 100 casual likers on Facebook or Twitter for that matter an day!

The bottom line is this: email marketing is still an important PART of any Internet marketing mix and should be integrated into your social media marketing efforts as another way to distribute your message via social media and to leverage social media to get new email subscribers.

If you need help with your own email marketing or set up please let us know. Hope you found this information useful. Thanks for reading.