Your mailing list is a very important asset, because it is a much more direct and intimate way to communicate with your readers and it is a much more in-depth relationship, face to face with your audience. The level of attention that a person who reads an e-mail will give you is much higher, more beneficial for your business than what you can get in a blog, in which you have to compete with many distractions.
When you send an e-mail to a person and this person decides to read it, in this case you have a very strong connection. If you try at some point to sell a service or a product to this person, it is much easier to do it in the e-mail channel.
Email marketing is not sexy
In fact, the e-mail channel is surely the least sexy channel of all this 2.0 movement …
Nobody talks about e-mail marketing but if we look at the numbers, the most profitable channel of all that can exist is e-mail marketing, far ahead of SEO techniques (positioning in search engines) and 1,000 times ahead of all the profitability that you can get to Social Networks. I do not talk about talking, I talk about selling.
But email marketing is by far the most profitable sales channel
If you really intend to develop a business whose on-line presence serves the objectives of your business, you have to set up a mailing list. Your mailing list is the database of your business, your potential clients.
“The money is on your mailing list”, this is what the Americans usually say: “the money is in the list” and I would say that the money is on the mailing list and above all, in your ability to develop a very intimate relationship with your readers, based on the contribution of value.
So mounting your mailing list is really the most important asset for your small business.