Another way to encourage online conversations is through emails. Many people believe emails are old-fashioned and social media are more effective means of communication. Actually, emails are still the most effective way of building up online contacts. Social media are proprietary applications and so your links and followers are not your property in the same way as your email list.
Everyone will be familiar with the invitation to stay in touch with a website by entering an email address. There are three main ways in which email addresses can be used:
- An RSS feed to send news of new blog posts to your list. This is easy to set up through your email service provider. You can set it up to send an email every time you post or else it can send a weekly or monthly summary.
- Send broadcast emails. You write an email and send it to everyone on your list. If you have more than one list, you can send the same email to everyone or send different emails to different lists. There are various ways of grouping and segmenting your lists so that you can target subgroups. If you are using emails for sales, broadcasts are the best media so long as you know what you’re doing!
- The email sequence is where someone signs up to your list and receives several consecutive emails on some topic. Commercial websites might send information relevant to their products and services so that their customers can learn more about what they are offering. Usually sequences are educational and as an incentive to encourage people to sign up to the list.
Remember people don’t like receiving sales emails, whether as broadcasts or part of a sequence. So, they should be used sparingly as part of a carefully planned campaign. Think of emails as a primarily educational medium.
The big advantage is people know how to reply to emails. The means to comment on blogs are not always obvious and sometimes there are various hoops to get through, such as registering, entering strings of characters to prove you’re not a machine and then waiting for your comment to be moderated. With emails you simply hit reply.
However, conversation by email is limited. Other people on the list don’t see your reply unless the website host shares it with them. There are ways around this, eg where an email includes a link to a web page, which can include a comments facility.
How have you used email for conversations?
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