Email marketing....part of the Core?

Given our class two weeks ago on email marketing, this article was timely, and corroborated what Professor Kagan and Brian Hecht told us – it comes via a new study by email marketing provider AWeber.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/272360/smbs-turn-to-email-marketing.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headline&utm_campaign=91658

They polled 1600 of their small business customers. Of course, they are a self-selecting group, since presumably they wouldn’t be a customer of AWeber unless they used email marketing, but still, I found some of the points particularly interesting:

            *75% of small business owners use email marketing to leverage their business

            *91% of them fulfill their marketing needs themselves (my highlight)

            *30% of them attribute 25% or more of their revenue to email marketing

*”The business owners who are rocking it with email marketing…see the value in growing an audience of email subscribers as part of the overall growth strategy for their business.”

Of course, the company that did the study has a vested interest in having the results support email marketing, but since they support what we learned in class, I am going to assume they are correct.

In any case, when you look at the numbers above, and the fact that these small business owners are also email marketers, it made me think that perhaps an email marketing class (or at least a segment) – the why’s and the how’s – should be part of our required classes. Because if this is one of the most powerful and most efficient marketing tools available for small businesses, and there are so many budding entrepreneurs at CBS, it feels like it should be part of the curriculum for everyone…maybe part of our Marketing class in the core?

The article ended with the advice that every email marketing message should contain a call to action, because apparently not all of them do: “the SMB owner doesn’t drive all the way to what they want the outcome to be….” When I think about my own habits, the marketing emails I click through on are always focused on getting me to act…bills, sales, offers for upgrades in status (hotels and airlines), etc etc., so clearly they are getting to the relevance and the call-to-action in the emails I receive (at least the ones that work). Anyway, the article put a nice exclamation point on the class for me, and has me thinking about email marketing for a nonprofit I am working with. It is something I haven’t done professionally, but I can see both from the research and from my own experience how important it is.