Your Email Database
At e-CBD we’re pretty big fans of email marketing. It’s an incredibly cost effective marketing tool with a high conversion rate. Yet it’s rather pointless without a decent email database.
In this three part blog series we will look at the importance of an email database, ways to build your database, and how best to use it.
Part 1: The Importance of a Database
In an increasingly digital world of websites, search engines, social media, smart phones, apps, and viral videos, a quality email database is often overlooked by businesses.
An email database is a business asset – a collection of email contact details of past customers, potential customers, loyal followers and those who are simply interested in your industry or product line.
This is a list of customers (or potential customers) you can market to directly, and you’ve probably been growing a list like this for years without even realising.
You might ask how this differs to having a current website or an active social media account. There are many reasons why your email database can be integral to the growth of your business.
Market to those who are interested
If you’ve been compiling a quality database than your email campaigns are going to go out to those who are already interested in what you have to say. You won’t have to fight for their attention or go to great lengths to prove yourself because they already signed up to hear about;
- New products
- How your business is growing
- Special offers
- Other industry specific information
Performance of email marketing
Email is far from dead. Today there are far more people with email accounts than Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts combined.
More importantly, email marketing is incredibly cost effective and has a high conversion rate, especially when you start to target specific demographics within your database.
Diversify your marketing
Avoid placing all your marketing eggs in one basket.
Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, so relying solely on site traffic that could drop off with the next Google update can be risky. Just as social media platforms can lose popularity as new ones arise – think about investing in a great Myspace following just before Facebook comes along.
Email Vs Social Media
As effective as social media marketing can be kept in mind that your profile is on rented land. You don’t own it and the site administrators control your access. While only a few years ago a business page could post something and it would appear on all their follower’s news feeds, today you can really only reach 1-2% of your Facebook fans.
Social media can be quite passive too, with users already in the habit of scrolling by the time your post appears, then disappears as they thumb their way down their news feed.
Emails encourage a more proactive approach – you have notifications that your email is there and you’re already actively clicking on the email to open and read it, so when customers get to a call to action in a newsletter campaign they are already in the habit of taking action.
These are just some of the reasons why an email database can be an asset for your marketing. If you would like to talk about how we can help your business with building an email database simply contact us today.
Look out for our next blog post in this series for some highly effective ways to grow your email database. In the meantime, check out our Top 11 Email Marketing Tips to get you started.
