You have your customers’ emails, right?  You can start collecting email addresses from prospects that don’t turn into customers, right?  Then you have enough email addresses to start an email marketing campaign.

Whatever your reason for not using email, forget about it and start.  There isn’t a good reason not to.  In fact, here are seven reasons email marketing rocks-

1.  Email is still the communication method of choice for businesspeople.

It just is.  It is for you too, right?  The reasons it works for you are the same reasons it works for everybody else.

2.  Email marketing is inexpensive.

No printing.  No postage.

3.  Email is immediate.

Ninety-plus percent of your response will happen within 48 hours.  You can send, assess results, make adjustments and send again in a matter of days.  Compare that learning cycle to direct mail.  Days instead of weeks.  Heaven for direct marketers.

4.  Email marketing builds relationships.

When you send something in the mail you have a real investment.  So you feel the need to ask for the order.  “Hello, I’m Hamilton, we just met, but here’s who I am, here’s what I’m selling, how many would you like?”  Sounds stupid, right?  Why would a mailing that does the same thing be anything but stupid?  Email isn’t expensive, so you’re more inclined to have a more natural relationship with people.  “Hello, I’m Hamilton, we just met, so I thought I’d share an article with you that helps you understand more about this topic we’re both interested in.”  Isn’t that relationship off to a better start?

5.  Email marketing is convenient.

Click to read.  Click to read more.  Access just about anywhere, anytime.  If getting your message, if beginning a relationship, if doing anything related to you is difficult, I’m not doing it.

6.  Email doesn’t kill trees.

No printing.  A nice reason to use email marketing.

7.  Email isn’t hard.

It might be hard based on how you have done it in the past, but it isn’t.  Use an email service that provides design templates for the email messages, manages your name list, sends the emails and tracks results.  I use myemma, MailChimp and Constant Contact for my clients.  MailChimp is free.

But wait, there’s more. . .

You sort of have wanted to use email marketing but you don’t use because starting small just doesn’t feel right.  You wouldn’t bother with a 65 piece direct mail campaign, why bother sending email to 65 people?  Old rules, new world.  For all the reasons above, you should bother sending email to 65 people.  Because as you add email addresses every week and every week, those 65 people will grow to 75, then 90 and eventually 300 or a 1,000.  And by the time you reach those types of number you will have communicated with most of those people 50 times.  That’s called having a relationship.  Compare having a relationship with, say, 300 people — contacting them 12 to 18 times over a year’s time — to mailing four times to 5,000 people during that same year.

Yeah, I know, email still rocks!

Related blog posts:

Boost Email Readership 3 Way

8 Lessons Learned from My First Million Emails

As a marketing consultant I have a similar message for clients:

Follow the smartest people in your field, and use social media to do it.

And that’s the beauty of social media, it makes it so easy to spend time with people much smarter than you.  Heck, you can (and should!) spend time with your competitors.

Then go to someone’s account and take a look at the people they follow and where they’ve left comments.  But you must first subscribe to their feed (a single click) in order to see who they follow and where they’ve commented.

Then click on “subscriptions,” the people they follow, and check out some of those people by hovering your mouse over a person’s icon to see a short blurb about them.  Go to their feeds and subscribe to them if they seem interesting.

Next click on “comments,” which shows you what they’ve commented on.  The thought here is people leave comments on the people’s feeds they are most interested in.  So, comments are a direct line to the people they think are smart.

Yep your mother was right, and social media makes it easier than ever to spend more time around smart people.

Here are some of my favorites.  Some are just great videos, others show people who would make great applicants for the job.  Bottom line, where are some of the most interesting videos being shot?  By the applicants for this job!

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpWdRo3exZo[/youtube]

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9O37wi0BZI[/youtube]

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2LfT_uzxuk[/youtube]

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmcQNb8L3QQ[/youtube]

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQVf4VsvSYk[/youtube]

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHcG_63SDA[/youtube]

Remember the old political quip from Bill Clinton’s first campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid”?  It was written throughout his HQ to remind everyone the economy was the central issue of the campaign.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for linking to Thomas Baekdal’s post Where Is Everybody? in which Baekdal creates a graph (reproduced here) that shows how much how we communicate with each other has changed.  It also makes my marketing quip, “It’s the Message, Stupid!”, even more obvious.

My point: don’t forget your marketing message!!

Everybody’s all hyperventilated about whether they should focus on Twitter, continue to blog, give more time to LinkedIn, Facebook, FriendFeed, DIGG and on and on and on.  The same way I imagine they hyperventilated about newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, as the electronic word began to overtake the printed word.

It’s the message, stupid!  Yes, be mindful of how you communicate.  No, that isn’t enough to be successful.  If you have nothing to say or a me-too product, you simply won’t get much traction or notice or attention, regardless of which social medium you employ.

Does the medium change the message?

Sure.  But only the scale, you still need a message that resonates with your target audience.  Imagine yourself a marketer in 1967 tasked with selling Admiral refrigerators.  You just finish this nifty full-page ad in Life magazine and they want you to do a TV commercial.  How do you cram all that information into a short TV spot?!  Good question.  And actually, the answer is you don’t.  You need to take the core of your message and work with that.

Fast forward. . .you can’t even fit that nifty headline into a 140-character tweet!!  How about a 95-character Adwords ad!

Be where your customers and prospects are going for their information.  Clearly, that includes social media.  But make sure you also focus on the message.  Being at the right place isn’t enough.