Email Marketing Remains Reliable

hree misconceptions refuted

Keeping up with the latest marketing techniques is a good thing; new stuff can be very useful. At the same time, the process of keeping up can act to prevent a person from ever getting ahead, and an expert recently spoke up to say that email marketing remains effective.

Gail Goodman named three misconceptions about email marketing, with the first being that the inbox is irrelevant. She wrote, "It's true that consumers are getting more e-mail now than ever before. That's exactly why permission-based e-mail marketing is so valuable in reaching customers overwhelmed by inbox overload. . . . [W]hen someone signs up for your mailing list, they're giving you a vote of confidence that your e-mail content is valuable to them."

The second misconception relates to Facebook, Twitter, and all that: "social media has replaced email marketing." Goodman posits that email is a better way of reaching potential customers on a one-on-way basis than, say, a passing tweet that 300 other people may or may not view.

Finally, if you're concerned that young people don't use email anymore, you might simply be wrong, according to Goodman. Many young people use their email accounts to keep track of important, more formal, stuff, including work- and school-related communication.

Unless you've got some serious data to support a switch, then, try not to completely abandon reliable marketing methods for flavor-of-the-moment approaches. More