How do you market to your clients/customers?  Think social media is a good sales platform?  Think again.

While social media is a great platform to share content and create awareness, it is not a great sales platform.  Research by McKinsey & Company found email to be nearly 40 times more effective in acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

Email is the best way to deliver effective marketing messages to retain and acquire customers, increase brand awareness, make transactions, and generate leads.  This is especially true of business-to-business marketing in the healthcare and design industry.

So, if you've been focusing a lot of your efforts on social media, it's time to re-evaluate your email marketing. Here's 8 tips to get you started:

1. Less is more:  Keep scrolling to a minimum in email messages and newsletters by using tight copy and links to websites and other sources.
2. Keep it relevant:  Tailor messages and content to client/customer's individual needs. Answer questions about common problems.
3. Ask them to do something: Through the use of clear calls to action (e.g., Learn More, Download Report, Read Latest Blog Post), direct recipients to your website as quickly and efficiently as possible.
4. Consider frequency and timing:  Remember that relevancy of campaigns are almost always more important than the number of messages that are sent. Experiment with the days of the week when you send your emails to see which are more effective for your industry (hard to say for healthcare, but Tuesday is always a good bet) but try to establish a consistent pattern.
5. For subject lines, think headline news:  The subject line is the first line of defense between email recipients and the delete button.  It should scream benefits – telling the full story and entice them to read more.  It has the power to influence them even if they don’t open it.
6. Take time for text:  Make good use of real text at the top of emails, because graphic heavy emails will appear blank until the recipient has selected to download the graphics. Use good calls to action to drive traffic to the website with the promise of more information.
7. Get social:  Encourage recipients to socialize email content and share email marketing messages via their social networks by adding social media sharing buttons to emails.
8. Go mobile: The number of people reading emails on their smart phones is increasing, so make sure your email message format is mobile-friendly and supports video viewing.

Want more?  Check out this infographic on the "7 Myths of Email Marketing."

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