You’re crazy! Email marketing is the single best way to triple your sales in two days!
Blah blah blah.
You know the story.
If you read through Google about email marketing, you’ll likely find that just about everyone sings its praises about how it’s one of the single best ways to market your product or service.
However, it isn’t for my home service business.
I know that this opinion likely isn’t the most popular, but I’ve given it multiple shots, had mild success, but never became a big fan of email marketing.
Here’s why.
It’s Annoyingly Complicated
Over the years, I’ve used a lot of bad software.
However, software has improved so much recently that I find most products to be quite intuitive.
Not with email marketing.
For me, I’ve found that most email marketing software is cumbersome, time-consuming, and not worth my effort.
For one, you have to set up the campaign based on whether someone responds to the email or opens the email to get an optimal email campaign. With Facebook, the network basically does this for you.
They usually put the ads in front of people who will engage with the ad, and they’ll try a new one for you if the ad isn’t performing that well.
In addition, you need the actual email addresses themselves to target customers.
That’s why I’ve decided to focus my marketing efforts on Facebook.
On Facebook, I know exactly what I’m getting, and its interface is incredibly easy to use. Also, I can target people without needing their personal information.
Email Opens Are Tough
According to MailChimp, the average open rate in the architecture and construction industry hovers around 24.78%.
So, just a quarter of the people that you send an email to are opening it, and that doesn’t even tell you how many people are actually reading the email itself.
That isn’t great.
When you create a marketing campaign on Facebook, you know that the people who you target will actually see the advertisement.
They’re also more likely to interact with the message.
Email Campaigns Have to be Unified
When you create email campaigns, you have to ensure that everyone is receiving the same message and that that message lines up with everything else that you have out on the internet or that you told them in-person.
For example, maybe you go out to a client’s house to replace standard a Phifer screen mesh. You tell the client that the screen should last them around 15 years, because they have an under truss application.
Later, you send out an email about how often you should replace a screen. If the article that you link to says 10 years, you might get a response with a negative connotation, such as “your sales guy told me it would last 15 years”. Now you’ve got to explain.
People often respond directly and negatively to emails, which obviously you don’t want. Often we got feedback from folks who thought our price was too high or went with a competitor. While feedback is helpful, the direct responses were usually rather aggressive and brought a bad vibe through the office.
In Facebook, people often just scroll through the ad and don’t feel the need for direct response. Maybe they leave a comment. If they leave a negative comment, you can always use it to show other customers your level of customer service, or just delete it or ban the user if they’re really causing a scene.
It Can Give You a Bad Name
For me, I get tired of seeing all of the different spam emails that I get throughout a day.
While spam used to just be an easily recognizable thing, spam now comes in all forms.
Much of that spam is from companies using email marketing campaigns.
When I see these types of companies sending out emails all the time, it gets annoying. It makes me not want to use their business.
I think that that kind of attitude is only going to spread as more and more companies send out more and more emails.
So, I just stay away from it to avoid my customers thinking of my company as spam.
A Better Alternative…
Lets think about what our objective with email marketing is: to get relationship content building content, or promotional content in front of our current customer base. What delivers just that? Facebook ads I’ve referenced throughout this post. On top of it all, organic shares and like will compound the results at not cost.
Related Post: Facebooks Power Features For Home Service Businesses.
The Takeaway
I know that a lot of people will disagree with my stance on email marketing, but I also think that a lot of business owners feel the same way that I do about these campaigns.
For those who have tried both email marketing and Facebook campaigns, I think that most of them would find Facebook campaigns easier to create, manage, and use for conversions.
I just don’t believe that email marketing lives up to the hype that so many digital marketing experts claim for it to be.
What do you think?
Let me know your opinion on email marketing campaigns in the comments section below!