Have you ever received an email from a company after a long while and thought to yourself, “Gee, I was wondering whatever might have happened to them”?

Your answer to that question – and I’m guessing here – is most likely “no.”

Because if 42 days or more have passed since that company last communicated with you, you’ve most likely forgotten about them.

You’ve forgotten them. You’ve forgotten why you might be on their email list. You’ve forgotten why you might have been interested in them.

And you certainly haven’t learned to trust them, to rely on their authority, to think about them as a possible resource for whatever problem you’re having or opportunity you’re facing.

Because it’s been at least 42 days since you last heard from them.

In the flurry of all of the marketing activities that marketers get sucked into, it can be easy to lose sight of the basics – especially in small businesses and solo operations. Gotta work on the website? Okay, everything else falls behind. Need to ramp up social media outreach? That becomes first on the list. Design a new brochure, create a lead magnet, write a blog post… so many priorities. We get it.

The single most important thing marketers do is COMMUNICATE with their prospects and customers.

And the single most effective way to do that communication is via email.

If you are not communicating with the people on your list regularly, they will forget you. They will be captivated by the people who ARE communicating with them, and those competitors of yours who continue to communicate are the ones who will most likely earn the trust, and ultimately win the business, of YOUR prospect.

Communication that goes out once in a blue moon won’t work for anyone. 🙂

A little tough love here…

Writing blog posts and expecting that your audience will simply show up and read them is not going to serve you.

Posting to social media – especially if you’re strictly a “meme poster” – isn’t communicating with your audience in a way that is going to serve you (or them).

Yes, creating content is incredibly important – and a good content plan MUST be accompanied with a good communication plan in order to be truly effective.

And back to the beginning…

As I said above, “If you are not communicating with the people on your list regularly, they will forget you.” Note that I said “regularly” in that sentence.

Your email communications should have a cadence – once a week ideally, every two weeks is okay. More often if you have a highly engaged audience, sure. But once a month is too infrequent to stay top-of-mind with your audience – and top-of-mind is exactly where you want to be when a prospect is ready to make a buying decision.

It bears repeating: The single most important thing marketers do is communicate REGULARLY with their prospects and customers. Consider it the “prime directive of marketing.”

Everything else is enabling the prime directive. Write blog posts so you can send them out via email. Post to social media so you can bring people back to your site to view your content so you can get them onto your email list so you can email them with your new content. See what I mean?

As Warren Buffett said, “If you can’t communicate, it’s like winking at a girl in the dark – nothing happens. You can have all the brainpower in the world, but you have to be able to transmit it.”

As marketers, we must be able to communicate our value, to build trust and authority, to earn the right to be at the table – and we do this by PROVIDING value to our prospects and customers. The most effective vehicle of that communication is email. And for email to be truly effective, you want to send it on a regular basis.

Cadence counts.

We’ve seen marketers collect a bunch of new leads and then ignore them while they worked on their website or developed a new lead magnet or whatever they were doing. What do you think happened when those marketers FINALLY communicated with those new leads, months later? If you guess “opt-outs,” you’d be right. If you guess “low open rates,” you’d also be right.

What if you had a regular habit of posting a new blog post every week or every other week, then your email system would automatically send out the newest blog post to your email list? All you have to do is write the post, and your email system takes care of the rest – you don’t even have to write a new email. You’d be communicating – and providing value – and earning trust… and, and, and.

You don’t need a big fancy content calendar. You don’t need to “complexify” this. You simply need a commitment to create content and communicate it on a regular basis.

Do it so you aren’t forgotten.

Do it so you remain top-of-mind with the people on your list.

Do it so you can track what people click and download so you can do a better job of segmenting your list and sending relevant emails to those who are interested in a specific topic.

Do it so that when you make an offer, you’ve got people who will listen and buy.

Regular, valuable email communication is the one marketing tactic that consistently yields the best results.

What do you think?