John W HayesIf you are seriously considering investing extra effort into email marketing, I want you to block off the next couple of hours in your schedule and dedicate them to reading this blog post because I’m going to share with you 150 reasons why email marketing makes so much sense.
Not have the time?
OK, how about just one good reason?
The average person picks up their smartphone 150 times every day. That’s once every six-and-a-half minutes (if we average in 8 hours sleep).
Because email is now an integral part of the mobile environment, this means you have 150 opportunities every day to engage with your audience via a device they simply cannot live without. Smartphone users don’t want your engagement, they demand it.
This means you can target your customers and prospects anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
Although I don’t consider myself obsessed with my smartphone, it is very often the last thing I look at before going to bed at night and the first thing I pick up in the morning. Hell, I even use it to wake me up. I also find it incredibly hard to ignore any beep or whistle that informs me of an incoming message. Like I said, I’m not obsessed; I prefer to think of myself as more – fully engaged.
How the world has changed.
It seems like only a few years ago when email was tethered to your desktop/laptop device and engagement was limited to the hours of work or allotted PC time. Back then, emails could be ignored for hours or (rather frustratingly for us marketers) even days at a time. Now, nobody ignores emails. They are so important we carry them around with us everywhere and check for new ones (alongside a whole host of other tasks) every six minutes of the day.
But just because we know that our subscribers hold their email inboxes closer to their hearts (or in their back pockets) doesn’t mean we can take them for granted.
Modern email marketers must embrace the medium fully. This means that both emails and landing pages should be optimized for the mobile environment and campaigns should be more personal (through better targeting and segmentation).
How have smartphones changed your approach to email marketing? Share your comments below:
This post first appeared on the iContact Email Marketing Blog.
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