We’re kicking off the first full week of December with Marketing Monday Q&A with Christina May, covering the topic of email marketing. If you’re like us, you spend a significant amount of time in your inbox. This edition covers the future (or lack thereof?) of email, the best way to get more contacts and improving email productivity.
Check out the full video here:
Question 1: Is email dead?
CMay: From a business perspective, email is not dead.
Email has become something that most people use almost daily. We use email for personal communication, retail transactions, customer service and more serious conversations with clients and employees. We get so many emails some days that we can’t even get through them all without devoting hours to sorting through our inboxes.
Email has become a standard method of communication, just like how everyone still has mailboxes in their homes. It’s not likely to be going anywhere, anytime soon.
That’s not to say that there aren’t better ways to reach potential customers. A lot of these communication and customer service features have moved to messaging platforms and in-app marketing.
Question 2: What are the best ways to grow my email list?
CMay: This can be done in a few ways.
When it comes to marketing communications, getting contact information, especially a potential customer’s email address, is key. You must have a reliable way to reach out and communicate with a potential client and be sure that they are receiving your messaging and marketing materials. Email is the best place to have that conversation.
Setting up your customer relationship software, or CRM, is the easy part of growing your list. The next part is keeping the data clean and organized once you start receiving contacts. There are free programs out there that can help with this.
If you’re starting from scratch, begin by looking for contact data in your existing inboxes. Pull names, emails and addresses and other relevant contact information to start your base list. After this, you can start a conversation with those contacts, and eventually try to get them to refer other people to you, thus growing your base.
The general rule to keep in mind is that you have to give information to get information. You must find something to offer people that they would be willing to give you their email address and contact information. You can do this by publishing content and giving out educational information like a newsletter that people can subscribe to.
Growing your contact base and email list is something you need to do on a constant basis. Emails become leads, leads become customers, more customers turn into even more customers.
Question 3: How do I improve my email productivity at work?
CMay: Categorize emails and limit your in-inbox time.
We can receive hundred of emails each day, depending on who you are and what you do. Categorizing emails and sorting them into different importance levels can help with productivity. This way, you’ll be able to prioritize the more important messages and get to those first.
Limiting the time you spend on email can also be a good rule to set for yourself. One example is to only check, sort and reply to emails at the beginning of the day and at the very end of the day. This way, you have the entire middle of the day to do more important things and get actual work done.
If you have a marketing question for us, please leave a comment or send us a message and we'll answer it in our next video. If you enjoyed this week’s edition of Marketing Monday, follow us on Facebook, subscribe to our Youtube channel.