It’s the era of information and with it comes the growing awareness of the marketing strategies that are attacking us from every corner. The customers are getting better at spotting sham, and with it their selectivity grows. This means that you need to double your efforts for the message to get through, and find new approach measured by metrics other than CTR or ROI. Purely transactional attitude is not a long-term strategy anymore.
Although many email marketers still struggle to make it work, the integration of your email campaigns with social media is a must. Everybody goes social on the net, so Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and their like have become the most influential media. Today your audiences must be built via many channels to keep you on top and ahead of the competition. Working adults, who with the highest disposable income are the highest purchase intent group, check their emails with a far greater regularity than use their social media accounts. However, email campaigns, even the highly personalized ones, only reach relevance in context of a relatively small group susceptible to your call-to-action. That’s the end of the story. Within a few days your email goes to the bottom of the list, and then becomes expired. However, if you try to integrate it with any online social community, its lifecycle is much longer, as a supplementary stage is introduced. A small number of genuinely interested email recipients pass on the message to a larger group of similar enthusiasts, some of them share it further and this way you get free supplementary brand promotion, more buzz, increased brand exposure and brand awareness and your message wins second life.
The major concern these days that all internet marketers are trying to address is why people start a relationship by subscribing, what makes them want to terminate it and how they go about it. Some recent studies point out that just the way a spontaneous “sparkle” of interest can start a relationship, a similar “sparkle” of reluctance can kill it. Now, the question that should follow is: what an email marketer can do to prevent it, or at least sustain the life of a relationship for as long as possible.
The question of efficient brand promotion has recently become vital for all online retailers. No service or product is unique anymore – their distinctive features sink in the sea of variations of the same idea. Ruthless as it sounds, we have to face it and deal with it. If we want it to be us, and not the tens or hundreds of our likes we have to stand out from the crowd, become recognizable and memorable.
