Email: The Backbone of Marketing

Ever have a BGO?

It means “Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious”. It’s a term popularized in the 1980s, but it’s still around today. Sometimes, something freakishly obvious to everyone just needs to be pointed out. Well, here’s one:

The online environment is the media of choice for information consumers.

There, I said it. And what’s more, it’s not going back.

But beyond the BGO, I’m more interested in what happens next. Marketers already use social media, web2.0 techniques, blogs, mobile text, apps, and email in addition to websites. If this is you, nice job! But you’re probably still managing all those digital properties like you’re still in the print environment. That is, you have a flagship publication (your website), and everything else is a satellite, drawing people back. So…

Abandon ship!

Remember the Spanish Armada? How their huge and powerful ships were sent packing by the English and their numerous smaller and more maneuverable vessels? Your landing pages, social media outlets, guest articles, blog posts, and email campaigns are a lot like these smaller ships, making you capable of competing against much larger companies with big, hulking websites.

Think of the sum total of these sites and outlets as your entire web presence, all under your control. Sure, with a lot of them, you have to deal with the limitations of someone else’s user interface, bandwidth, policies, or branding capabilities. But then, so do your competitors.

So make email the backbone.

Email is the only medium that is truly dynamic, with the ability to personalize a message according to your segmentation strategy. With automation, it can follow up with customers immediately after they visit one of your outposts. It is also the only medium that allows you to control when your customers see it. It is readily linked to your outposts and media, and acts as an extension of your web presence and ongoing promotions.

Assuming your customers have opted in to your email campaigns, email lets you personalize and strengthen the relationship, which you can’t do with static outposts, including your website. No matter what methods you use to put your brand in front of your customers, there’s only one central hub that ties all of it together: email.

Let us know! How are you using email to tie it all together?