If you’ve been reading my advice for very long you’ve heard me say stuff like, “The best use of Facebook is to grow your email list.”
I caught a lot of negative feedback when I first said that a few years ago!
The fact is though, I’ve been saying the same stuff for years now, and the list of experts who are calling me “nuts” is slowly shrinking.
Here’s my latest supporting evidence from a $500 report recently published by Forrester Research (Forrester.com). The title of the report is “The Purchase Path Of Online Buyers In 2012”. This research study followed 77,000+ online purchase transactions and concluded (among many other findings) that:
- Social media is not a significant driver of online purchases. Not even 1% of the 77,000 transactions could be traced back to social advertising or content links.
- The two biggest drivers for online purchases overall are clearly search engines* and email marketing with 30% of the transactions starting with a click on an email marketing campaign. The report also states that “Email is the most important channel for repeat customers“.
And what about my claim that Facebook never has been a tool for driving sales and is now fading?
In this recent article Facebook admits that it is losing appeal and sees rough waters ahead. A little research could produce many more such articles.
My conclusions:
If you want to be in the game long term you’d better be growing your email list and providing that list quality content that they can’t wait to read. If you want to be found on the search engines IGNORE SEO and just create quality content that’s “shareable”.
Resources:
Check out my comprehensive $7 video course that shows you all I know about email marketing.
*To read more of my thoughts about getting found on Search Engines check out the other blog posts in the “SEO” section of my blog, or read my SilentSalesMachine.com book for more info.
I can back this data up with my own experiences over the past 5 months.
I have been testing my golf e-books, videos and email lessons via paid traffic from the google display network. It goes: ad-content rich opt in page then email marketing. From about 1200 opt in over 5 months we get a 5% conversion rate.
Testing on facebook I got 1 sale from 130 opt ins using paid display ads on Facebook. Another test last week to a golf list owner resuted in 70 opt in for 3 sales which is 4-5%.
Testing…
Anthony
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Great question Eugene! The fact is, someone has to be on top of the search engines for the best keywords right? That’s a great place to be for sure…and if you can pull it off GO FOR IT, but there’s an ugly truth hiding behind SEO pursuits.
The “ugly truth” is this; just as quickly as you got there you could be on page 342 of the results tomorros. The only LONG TERM RELIABLE and SAFE way to drive traffic is via a large, loyal audience that wants to hear from you. All other strategies can be outdone by a competitor or an algorithm shift at google.
It seems like social media is fighting back in the search engines. I am seeing more and more FB G+ and U-tube hits on the first few pages. There is often repeated FB links with different amounts of likes showing older links.
I think that Jim has been right all along, if people genuinely like what you are doing then there is nothing to worry about, trends and algorithm changes will come and go.
People that try to game the system are using precious time and mental energy that could have been put into improving the underlying business or user experience.
Thanks for the post. I was talking to a girlfriend recently who has worked in marketing for businesses. She basically told me what the study you quoted revealed – that there’s no real convincing evidence that social media drives sales for businesses.
Hi Jim,
I would have to agree on your advise about Facebook. For small business owners the best use of Facebook is to use it as a way to gather subscribers. Let me give you an example of why, based on my 15 year old daughter. I can personally attest to the fact that she personally does not use Facebook as a social tool as much as she does SnapChat and other apps. However, she will use Facebook pages as a way to decide where she will spend her weekend evenings. She searches for whats playing at the local movie theater or what specials or events are going on at the bowling alley or skating rink. (Yes we live in a small town where her options are pretty limited about where to hang out.) Then she will make a post or text her friends to see what they are doing so she can decide what she’s gonna do that weekend.
However, here is the lesson for small business owners (especially those that own an offline small retail store). My 15 year old daughter LOVES going shopping for shoes and clothes. Several months ago, she was shopping at one of the outlet stores (I think she bought some shoes) and when she checked out the store offered her the chance to sign up for their email list to receive news about specials and sales. Of course, my daughter has learned how to shop for the best deals so she signed up. Over the last several months she has received several emails about specials that has led to me being dragged to the outlets for her to shop. What parent can resist a begging teenager that wants to spend her own money and is willing to do extra chores if I just drive her up there to shop?
Now, she may not have originally found that store on Facebook. However, I’d be willing to bet that if she had and they also offered her the option to sign up for their email list on their Facebook page then she probably would have signed up for it right there on the page. Lesson #2: Not only does my daughter love to receive her sales and specials emails. She also LOVES to share those sales and specials with her friends (either on Facebook, by word of mouth, or by text message). My daughter has also signed up for other newsletters (she don’t even know what they are called), from other stores within the outlets that she shops at. In fact, just last week, she was going on a trip to Montgomery to attend a FCCLA state club meeting. She decided she wanted a new outfit to wear on the trip. Can you guess what she did first? She got on her ipod, went to her email inbox and searched through her recent newsletters from Rue21 (her favorite outlet store for clothes) so that she would know what was on sale before we went shopping. And can you guess how many people she bragged to about the deal she got on her new outfit? Every friend that would listen! She also shared the name of the store she got it at and how they can sign up to find out about the store’s specials and deals. {Did you just catch that, my daughter is spreading the word about that business to her friends. I’d be willing to bet that at least a few of them will sign up to their mailing list because of my daughter. I also know that at least one of her friends went to that store and bought something because she (the friend) thanked my daughter for telling her about the special and how she got a good deal on her recent purchase.}
Take home lesson, even teenagers’ shopping behavior is being influenced by email newsletters. I’d be willing to bet that I’m not the only parent being dragged to certain stores because my daughter can’t pass up a good deal on items she wants. And it was all because my daughter signed up for that mailing list.
So in my opinion, small businesses would be very wise to use Facebook as a way to funnel people into their mailing list. It just makes good business sense to go where the traffic is to funnel traffic to your squeeze page or sign up form. Based on my monitoring of Alexa data over the last several months, Facebook goes back and forth with Google for the #1 ranking of sites that get the most traffic. Currently, Facebook is #2. Business owners might want to take a look at the other top sites and find creative ways to funnel those sites’ traffic to your mailing list. For example, YouTube is currently #3, and I know from watching Jim’s youtube videos that he mentions his squeeze page address (silentjim.com) in several of his videos. (I’m sure Jim could tell you how many subscribers he’s getting from those videos.)
So as a business owner (or internet marketer) can you produce short, content rich videos for your audience (make sure to mention your squeeze page address) to post on youtube? I’d be willing to bet that you could funnel some of those viewers to your sign up page. Can you think of other creative ways to funnel traffic from the other top ranked sites to your mailing list sign up page? I can think of several ways to use some of the top 20 sites to funnel traffic to a squeeze page for a variety of different business types. However, I will leave that for another post (this one is already very long).
Facebook might be losing their teenage fans to other apps for their socializing, but the fact still remains….Facebook is still receiving a ton of traffic. So I believe that Jim’s advice still remains true. Use Facebook (and other top traffic sites) to build your mailing list! One caution, don’t tie ALL your list building efforts into just Facebook (or any other site(s) that are currently top). Be willing and able to adapt your efforts as new top sites come along. As Jim always advises about creating multiple streams of revenue, you should funnel the traffic from multiple sites to help build your mailing list.
I hope you found this post and my personal experience with my own teenage daughter useful!