Each month, we host a Live Strategy Call for our Insider Members, and the topic for August was all about growing and nurturing an email list!
At Crystal Media, we are, of course, huge fans of social media channels and the success they can bring a retailer, but we can’t quite call on our favorite social media platforms and our followers to be the most reliable. As a retail business, you need to secure attention and responses to your products, events, and store updates when you share about them. This is why we break down audiences into two categories: Dependable and Undependable.
Undependable audiences are our social media followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and subscribers on YouTube. There are a few reasons they are unreliable:
- Platform/Internet Outage: If social media platforms go down for a day, it leaves those retailers that solely rely on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok connection with customers without a way to communicate with them!
- Hackers: If your account gets hacked, you will not have access to your platforms. Sometimes it’s a painful (but hopefully short) journey to get the platforms back to reconnect with your audience.
- Glitches and bugs: You could experience a bug on your social platform that isn’t allowing you to upload your product catalog, use the latest feature, or share more about your products and services.
- Loyalty: Social media followers come and go, and are not as loyal as an email subscriber who has chosen to be directly contacted in their private inbox about your products and brand.
Dependable audiences are people who have opted in to see your content. This means text and email subscribers are a dependable audience because they have decided to take their interaction with you—whether through a trade show, in-store or on social media—a step further. They agree to you contacting them directly in their own private inboxes. Marketers often refer to your email list as “owned”, whereas followers are “rented”.
It’s always a smart idea to be nurturing multiple channels to build several strong paths to connect and sell to your audience. You should also be using social media to grow your email list! In our Live Strategy Call with our Insider members, we covered 10 ideas to grow your list, and also ways to strengthen and nurture your existing list.
Here’s an idea from the call that you can implement right away! Share a sneak peek of an item that email subscribers could see first, and include a link to subscribe to your email list so they can get the goods!
If you’d like to see more ideas and learn about email marketing and other digital marketing channels to grow your business, check out our social media membership for retailers, Insider membership, here.
What I Want You To Take Away From This Blog:
- Focus on building Dependable and Undependable audiences.
- Never rely on just one channel of communication to connect with your audience.
- Grow your email list through social media.
Okay, over to you…
If you’re focused on growing your list, consider a weekly invitation to your social media followers to subscribe to your email. Let us know in the comments which product you’ll be teasing on social to grow your email list!
Leave a Reply