Permission-based marketing. Someone has opted-in to your message. They like you enough to allow you to send them stuff. It gives you a foot in the door, so to speak, with a much higher percentage of conversions than just plain buying an ad in the social space and hoping you get noticed by your target demographic.
According to a recent Exact Target , most people don’t respond to marketing in the social space. I first read the survey findings via a blog piece by Jay Baer. There are some interesting takeaways from the research, but the chart that caught my eye was the difference in preference for permission-based marketing messages between their 2008 results and 2012 results shown below. The top (grey) bar is 2008 and the orange bar is 2012. Email continues to grow and lead the field. Direct mail is losing traction. Social media doesn’t have the numbers I would expect.
One of the unfortunate fallouts of this data is that “liking” a brand on Facebook or following them on Twitter doesn’t have the marketing punch we had hoped for. Facebook was actually fourth on the list of preferred permission-based marketing channels at a pitiful four percent of the respondents. Truth is, as Jay Baer said, people aren’t in the social space to look at ads. They are there to connect with friends and family.
So, what’s the bottom line? If email marketing is a fit for your sector, you should be learning about it and using it. There are many inexpensive email platforms out there, and they all provide multiple ways to capture emails directly into a list-based data base. Are you capturing email addresses on your website, at events, in your social media? Use the comments to give us your best email tips and thoughts on the Exact Target research.
All images are from the 2012 Channel Preference Survey from Exact Target.
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