Early this year, at the height of the Canadian winter, my wife booked a trip for our family to visit a nearby farm to let our son see the animals and explore the area.
It turns out, the day we booked ended up being so cold that they had to close for the day. You can almost picture the animals’ hooves being frozen to the turf, it was that cold.
But we didn’t know they were closed. And we didn’t check the weather to see if it was exceptionally cold that day. So, we bundled up well and headed over to the farm, as good Canadians do.
When we arrived, the person working said they were closed that day. We didn’t get any phone calls or emails about it. And their website didn’t mention anything.
“Didn’t you check our Instagram account?”, he asked.
No, we didn’t even think to check their Instagram account. And even if we logged into Instagram that morning, would we see their message amidst the posts of our actual friends and family?
But I definitely noticed all emails that came in that morning. I get notified of every single one.
Which gets me thinking…
Would you rather make email or social media your primary communication channel?
Of course, they have different purposes. You might say that social media is for distributing your ideas and building relationships with people online.
And to a large extent, I’d agree with that. But I wouldn’t rely on social media to communicate important things to my clients or prospects. And I wouldn’t build it at the expense of email.
Email is the one thing every single person with access to the internet has. Most people check it daily, if not many times a day.
My reminder here is to make building and nurturing your email list your top priority. It’s a lot easier to get important messages across—algorithm-free—and to actually sell things later on.
Yes, it takes time to build. But you won’t build a list by thinking about it. You do it one subscriber at a time.
—k