By Clarissa Harris, Managing Director at True Tribe
Here we go again. One of the world’s largest social media platform Facebook along with Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have experienced yet another global outage, leaving many marketers (including myself) patting themselves on the back for pushing their clients onto email lists circa way back when.
What seems to have occurred in the timeline of a PR nightmare following ex-employee and whistle-blower Frances Haugen’s 60 Minutes interview a day ago, where leaked internal documents revealed that the monolithic application knew of the harms its services were causing, there’s a far bigger priority marketers need to be focusing on. And that’s an email list.
For those who haven’t began building an email list, let this Facebook outage be a clear warning. You do not have as much control over your social media marketing as you may think.
If past events have taught us anything, outages like these are becoming common with two most recently having occurred in March and July this year. Even if they’re a few hours, they have the potential to upend ad campaigns, scheduled posts and competitions not to mention access to third-party apps which require Facebook logins. It’s also fair to say that outages like this can’t happen on other platforms.
By not thinking of an email marketing strategy, you’re putting yourself in serious risk of not being able to communicate to your audience, access or review important data to continue your business operations. And if you still need convincing here are 5 reasons why you need to create an email list.
1. You own your audience
If a social media platform decides to limit the content served to your audience (remember the Facebooknews ban?) you have a custom list you can fall back on.
2. It has incredible ROI
Recent stats by Litmus have found on average email campaigns delivered an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent, making it one of the most effective marketing methods.
3. It drives traffic to your website
The main call to action in an email is to click off the page and onto a new one. Ensure the landing page is optimised and you've got yourself a steady stream of traffic.
4. You can use audience insights
For ads on Facebook (when it works) and Pinterest, you can upload your email list to build lookalike or actalike audiences to target new customers with similar demographics, interests and behaviours.
5. It's free (for the most part)
If you're starting from scratch, chances are your list will have humble beginnings. You can sign up to free plan with Mailchimp, HubSpot, Omnisend and ConvertKit.