Email Marketing or Social Media – which way is best to reach your customers ?
It’s getting complicated, isn’t it? With online users now using any number of different communication channels, just where do you target your marketing campaigns?
SME business owners in particular, are trying hard to know how best to get their company message out to their target audience. So many different means are now available that knowing the right ones for creating the right marketing strategies can be confusing.
The problem is that potential customers are not using just one medium to the exclusion of all others. Nor are they using many channels for the same purpose. Instead, each alternative method is selected for a particular purpose or plays a different role for the user.
The case for email marketing holds good as the preferred means of interacting in business applications whilst SMS tends to be selectively co-opted for business messaging as urgent alerts, e.g. ‘ running 10 mins late!’, and is mostly reserved for personal/social texting.
The rise of Twitter and Facebook as dominant social networking channels, has opened up personalised friendly messaging, which can be organised for a variety of specific grouping purposes and interactive follow up. Often brands and organisations will make contact in this informal way, and help to create an inclusive long term user community.
Online marketing now means you need to give your potential consumer a choice of ways to hear from you and let them pick the best one! Thus, RSS, instant messaging, social networks, and email should not be seen as ‘either/or’ and instead should be understood as providing business a complementary choice of options.
The key is knowing when to use the right one at the right time with the right user!
The user will tell you, because… when you look at where to invest your time and resources, you need to check to see how they first contacted you or the response to your delivered content. Essentially, the relationship with the recipient should fit with the context of each communication option.
Hand in hand with website accessibility goes the preferred vehicle of arriving at and becoming engaged with your site, whether by email, smartphone, Twitter, Buzz , etc. However, these preferences and contexts will change through time just as banner ads and email have evolved as new technologies become available, so constant review will be required.
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