Wolfgang Digital held their annual digital marketing conference in the Google Foundry on June 16th 2017. Michaela spoke about building audiences and the value of email.
12. “You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of
customers,
millions of clients or millions of fans…
To make things happen
you only need 1,000 true fans.”
- Kevin Kelly, Founding Editor, Wired magazine
Editor's Notes
I think one key takeaway from today is that your digital marketing is only as strong as your focus on building, developing and serving your audiences.
Gabriela showed how you can use cookies via Google to help you do this.
However, I want to offer a word of caution today: These are cookies. You do not own these audiences. They are not your true fans. And if you forget that, your audience strategy could be in trouble.
So what should you do? Abandon those tactics? Absolutely not. Use the capabilities you have there, but we have to simultaneously be working to engage those audiences that we rent from the likes of Facebook and Google and turn them into our own owned audiences for the long-term. . How can we do this?
Start building your email lists and start developing your email marketing.
Cookies are great because they allow us to get so granular with our targeting. But if you can impress a user so much that they volunteer an email address to you, not only do you open up tonnes of email based remarketing options across all of your other channels, but you can reach that user directly, for free, right in their inbox.
Unsexy as sounds after 360 video and voice search and in-store tracking, Email was a star performer in our KPI benchmarks study last year. It found that email drives the same amount of traffic as all social media channels combined. And it is the biggest driver of revenue after search. And when it comes to audience building email gives you much more longevity than cookie-based tactics and much more control over what, when and how you communicate with your audience. No 20% text rules, no CPCs to pay, no 140 characters to constrictions.
I’ve a quick example of how simple it is to get started on this and the role that Content plays
Ordnance Survey Ireland are building a really high quality list of subscribers. They identify very specific audiences, produce really high quality content for them and they provide a very simple way to sign up for more. Do these things and your most valuable audiences will invite you into their inboxes.
By concentrating on this on a consistent basis, OSi took their email list from 0 – 1000 in less than a year.
The interesting thing here is that you can sign up for the Osi newsletter on almost any page on the website, but 82% of all subscriptions happen here, immediately after reading a blog post.
1,000 subscribers, you might say? That’s not very big is it? But consider the value of that 1000 compared to say, 1000 twitter followers. This is a 1,000 people who engaged with Osi’s content, maybe even went on this walk, and handed over their name and email address and content preferences because they want to hear more from OSi. That is a high value subscriber right there.
Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine recognised the value of this type of subscriber too when he wrote.
“You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans… To make things happen, you need only 1,000 true fans.” Kevin Kelly
So I’d like to leave you with that. Create Value, attract your true fans and build your audience strategy to drive value for the long-term.