Email Marketing has been around for a long time and the first lesson any newbie internet marketer used to learn was . . .
“The money’s in the list!”
But does a big list still mean big profits, or have other online marketing methods forced it into an early retirement? That’s a good question. You hear it a lot these days, but email marketing is alive and well in 2014 and marketers who fail to include it in their arsenal of marketing tools could be missing out on a valuable source of ONGOING revenue.
Why Email Marketing?
Internet marketers all have one thing in common—they have something to sell. That “something” may be a product they have created, or have paid someone else to create; or they may be promoting affiliate products. They might even be promoting a service, but somewhere, somehow, they are hoping to sell something and email marketing has proven to be an effective method of reaching potential customers.
What is this “List” Anyway?
The famous “list” is just a name that internet marketers use to refer to the list of people who have agreed (opted in) to receive emails from them. It isn’t the size of a list that matters though; it’s the quality of the list. This has always been true and will continue to the case in 2014 and beyond. A good (profitable) list contains the email addresses of people who have already expressed an interest in the niche the marketer is working in—its targeted—and therein lies its power.
Can Email Marketing Compete with Alternative Marketing Techniques?
Email marketing campaigns are not the only way modern-day internet marketers can attract an audience for their chosen product or service. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds can also be an effective marketing tool, as can the various social networks—YouTube included—and many marketers also use SMS campaigns. Are they effective techniques? You betcha! But that does not mean they are better than email marketing, or that they should be regarded as an alternative to it. They are additional options, not replacements, and in the competitive world of internet marketing it pays to keep all options open and use all the tools available, and a well-written email can have a personal feel that other methods can never hope to match.