Are You Marketing on the Biggest Social Network?

Twitter has over 575 million accounts. Facebook reportedly has 901 million users. Yet neither of those are the biggest social network of all. So if you’re spending any time marketing your business on those platforms, you should definitely be investing time and/or money in what is the undisputed largest social network that even predates MySpace.

Do you know what it is?

Email.

A study by the Radicati Group showed that as of 2012, there are 3.3 billion email accounts in existence. And by the end of 2016, there are expected to be over 4.3 billion accounts.

So how does it qualify as a social network? Well, let’s look at Wikipedia’s definition of a social networking service.

A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on facilitating the building of social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections.

Email is online, it is a service, and it is all about social relations among people. And since it’s been around since 1970’s (or the 1980’s, depending on how you define it), it’s grown to be the biggest single point of online communication in the world, and shows no signs of dropping to second place.

The question you should ask yourself, then, is why you’re not doing a better job of utilizing what is possibly the best social media tool a business has, your email newsletter.

Have you done any of the following?

• Defined a purpose for your email newsletter
• Determined a way to track goals associated with that purpose
• Set a schedule for your email newsletter based on data and your target market
• Carefully planned individual emails with special thought given to the subject line
• Considered what impact the design has on your target market
• Considered what impact specific content has on your target market

Like any social media efforts, it’s easy to get frustrated with your email newsletter if you haven’t done most of those things.

Want to take on the project yourself?

If so, we recommend using MailChimp. (Side-note: If you click over to the MailChimp site from here, we do get some credit of some sort.) MailChimp has a reputation for being easy to use when you’re getting started. They also have a variety of flexible templates, and offer a free option that you may be able to use for quite a while.

If not, and you would like help with the project, T&S can help!

We can assist with the initial planning, setup and design. Then you can run it yourself, or you can have us manage your email newsletter on an ongoing basis.

One of our client shared that we save him about 6 hours a week by running his email newsletter for him. If you’re good at math, you already know that’s 24 hours a month.

Holy cow!