Technology becomes ever more advanced with each passing year – well, more like each passing day, really – so there is a constant temptation and drive to always get “on the programme” with the most cutting-edge gadgets and systems. Email is still relevant and you shouldn’t discard it in the pull of all that new stuff.
Sometimes, however, it’s the more well-established and “old-fashioned” systems that might still have a competitive advantage over the more sophisticated alternatives, in a variety of ways. The classic marketing and recruitment email, for example, is still going strong despite the fact that the medium of email has been around for just about as long as the Internet, and is hypothetically superseded by all sorts of other messaging apps, and professional social media platforms.
In fact, the ROI from email marketing shows why email is still relevant today, despite heavy competition from the plethora of emails the average user receives every day.
While LinkedIn or Twitter may have their benefits, and while is useful to always be able to phone up prospective clients or prospects via your Skype number, good old-fashioned email is still in the game, and can still do a lot of things better than the young buck new contenders.
Here are a few reasons why email is still relevant in marketing and recruiting.
Email is a well-established medium that signals formality and professionalism
Email is still relevant in a world where respondents see social media as too casual and cold calling, too aggressive. Supporting this, surveys soliciting users’ reactions to being contacted through different platforms reveals that messaging through social media risks seeming a bit too casual and presumptuous, while spontaneously phoning someone up can seem overly aggressive and full-on, and is as likely to make the person you’re contacting feel flustered as anything else.
Email is a well-established medium. It’s been around for a long time, and we all understand the basic rules of etiquette surrounding it. Email is ubiquitous in business, and contacting someone in a business context via email is naturally understood as an appropriate marketing tactics, effective and low-cost.
In other words, email is a medium which, in the right context, signals formality and professionalism as opposed to sending mixed signals, or being “up in the air” with its implications.
Of course, you still have to phrase your email appropriately, and make sure that the person you’re contacting has at least a reasonable probability of being receptive to what you’re sending them, but the path is a lot smoother and clearer when sending an email than with just about any other form of communication.
Everyone (more or less) is on it
There are all sorts of really popular social media services, messaging apps, and all the rest, on the market today. The thing is, no matter how popular they are, there is simply no service out there that is as ubiquitous as email. Not by a long shot.
LinkedIn or Twitter may boast a pretty extraordinary number of active users, but everyone – with very, very few exceptions – has an email account, for work, if for nothing else, that they will typically check their inbox on a regular basis.
Of course, there is a separate issue with actually identifying the email address of the person you’d like to contact, but as a general tool and approach for reaching out to people, email is still king.
Think of it this way – if you met someone at a networking function, and wanted to stay in touch to pitch them a particular job role, or explain your product to them, would you feel more confident asking for their email address, or for their Twitter or Facebook handle? Now, some folks may prefer social contact, What’sApp, or another messaging platform, but everyone uses email every day.
Email marketing is still relevant
Successful email marketing is a critical and often overlooked, element of digital marketing that still works despite some high-profile negative press.
According to an article on Inc:
But after a couple decades of Nigerian prince schemes, Spanish lotto scams, and mountains of unsolicited spam (which is never a good marketing tactic), how do people feel about email now? Is it still a worthwhile tactic for small-business owners and marketers to pursue?
The simple answer is yes.
Obviously, to achieve this success, you have to understand the nuances of email marketing and you can learn more about that here.
Emails are free to send and receive, and easy to batch
LinkedIn apparently has a very high response rate on their messaging service, but one of the catches to that is that they charge for their messaging services, and even an expensive “pro” account only entitles you to send a certain number of messages in a given month.
And, despite some costs for set-up and marketing to grow your list, email is free to send and receive, which also means that they are easy to batch. The low-cost likely impact the ROI figures displayed earlier.
If you’re running a lively marketing campaign – as is likely the case if you’re trying to get a new business off the ground, for example – then you’ll want as many interested parties as possible to recieve (and read) your email. It’s certainly not likely that you’d be happy with sending out a handful, and then being told that you’d reached your “limit, as happens with LinkedIn’s messaging platform”
Of course, it’s important to avoid spam emails, but marketing – and for that matter, recruitment to a degree – is largely a numbers game, in which there are significant benefits to being able to contact a lot of people, easily, and for free.
Email is simple and universally understood – there’s very little risk of overwhelming people
In addition to the fact that email is well understood as an acceptable medium for professional communications, email is also a medium that everyone essentially understands.
Contacting people through different platforms, especially if you or they don’t really understand the etiquette involved, comes with a pretty substantial risk of resulting in people feeling overwhelmed and off-balance. Whether marketing, or recruiting, you want the people you’re contacting to feel comfortable, rather than jarred. Email, therefore, is a pretty good default tool to use.
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