small business email marketing is the best social media networkSmall Business Email Marketing along with your website should be your primary online marketing channel. Social media should be secondary.

Is Social Media really all that?

You don’t have to navigate too far on the Internet before you see a story lauding social media. Each story telling you why you need a Twiter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, SnapChat… for your business. This is very overwhelming.

My school of thought is to concentrate on the one or two social media networks that work for you. There are great tools like Social Pilot (Add Link) and Sumo that can help you share your posts to multiple social media networks, but at the end of the day are you generating sales from social media?

What is your Return on Investment (ROI) for Social Media?

Let’s not get caught in the weeds here. Keep it simple and think about your Social Media conceptually:

  • How much time each week are you spending on Social Media for your business and how much does the time cost you?
  • Are you spending money on social media tools?
  • What about spending money on social media advertising?
  • Paying an agency or employee to handle Social Media?
  • How much revenue is Social Media Generating?
  • How many people are viewing your social media posts and being turned into leads?

The first four bullets are your Social Media costs and the last two are your Social Media benefits. Do the benefits greatly outweigh the costs? How well can you really measure social media lead generation? This is where a lot of Social Media starts to break down. There is no doubt that if you are doing social media right, you are creating good will and credibility with customers. But, how can you really put a number on how much is leading to sales? Also, how do you know you are talking to your fans?

Small Business Email Marketing solves many of the Social Media Issues

I am not saying you should drop your Social Media Marketing program. But, you should supplement your program with email marketing. Actually, it is the other way around. Email Marketing should be your primary online marketing channel along with your website. Social Media should supplement, be secondary to, your website and email marketing.

Here is why Small Business Email Marketing is so important:

  1. You own your email list. Facebook, Google, Twitter, and all the other services you use for email marketing can change their rules tomorrow and greatly affect your business. But, you can always reach out to your fans via email.
  2. People open an email. On February 23rd, 2017, I sent an email out to a small segment of my list. Only 116 people got the email and 16 people opened the email and 3 people clicked on the call-to-action. On the same day, I sent out the same message to my 13.4k followers on Twitter (@SMBStrategy) twice. Only 1 click…
  3. Getting above the Social Media noise. Look at your favorite social media channel. For me it is Twitter. How many tweets do you get a day… thousands. How many do you read… ten… twenty… Now, look at your email inbox. How many emails do you get a day… hundreds. How many do you read… hundreds. I don’t read every email I get, but I probably read over 50% whereas I probably read less than 1% of the tweets I get.
  4. Subscribers want your product. How have subscribers been added to your list? Shopping in your physical store, online store, or browsing your website? They have signed up because they want your product and are open to being sold your product.

Small Business Email Marketing equals Revenue

Here is a rule of thumb that I have based on clients and other Email Marketing experts:

Each email address on your list results in $3 to $5 per year in revenue.

This is not very sophisticated but if you have an email list of 100 fans, you should be able to generate $300 to $5oo per year. At 1,000 you are generating $3,000 to $5,000 per year. At 13,400 subscribers, I would generate $40,200 to $67,000 per year. Why 13,400? That is my number of Twitter followers. I do not generate even close to that revenue from Twitter. In fact, I can generate more revenue from an email list of 250 fans than I can from 13,400 followers on Twitter.

Does Email List Size Matter?

Ahh, the age old does size matter question. And the answer is yes and no. The more fans you have on your list is great, but you can do great things with a small list. Particularly if they are your fans, that have signed up through your website or social media. Remember, “Subscribers want your product.”

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Get the FREE Email Marketing Resource Guide

I have experience with lists under 1,000 subscribers that have generated $5 per subscriber per month instead of per year. These email lists tend to highly targeted for very niche products, but at 1,000 subscribers at $5 per month your yearly revenue is $60,000. Does an extra $60,000 a year sound good?

Also, many Email Service Providers (ESPs) now include tools to target and automate your emails. So, turning a small list into a revenue-generating list has gotten a lot easier. Get your Small Business Email Marketing game on and grab the FREE Email Marketing Resource Guide: 7 Business Tools I Use to Send 200,000+ Emails Pre Week (Hint: They are all FREE)

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