With the proliferation of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Pinterest boards and social media communities for virtually anything, why exactly do you need email marketing today?
Old School email baggage.
The medium seems a little over the hill at the moment. Sure, you may have invested in building, maintaining, and cleansing a prospect and customer list. But the idea of sending them emails about your products, services, news or commentary might just be considered a bit irrelevant given the emergence of social media and it’s new reach and influence.
If you can instantly broadcast any value that you offer to a community that has “opted-in” to your network or group, why would you invest the time, resources and expense to create and deploy an email message with the risk of:
• never having your message delivered due to the increasing effectiveness of spam blockers
• being perceived as just another SPAMer
• having your message instantly trashed
• just irritating prospects and customers with more stuff to manage in their in-box
Sharing with your community has its rewards.
Social media appears to be doing a much more effective job in delivering a marketers value to the people interested in it. That’s because the receivers of the content can share it, link off it or comment on it — all while seeing what others in the community have to say at the same time.
Who cares about a SPAM compliant lists, SPAM filters, firewalls, email PUSH providers and monitoring post deployment reporting. You can eliminate all of that and gain the even more valuable benefit of raising your internet visibility and search results ranking with social media.
While many organizations continue to participate in email marketing, more than ever they should be looking at their investment and considering if these resources could be better utilized by supporting their social media efforts. And as their social communities continue to grow in size and sharing frequency, comparing these two mediums reach and effectiveness will become essential.
Are you continuing to use email marketing as part of your marketing strategy? Do you see it as a more effective media for connecting with prospects and customers than Social Media? Please share your experience so we can share it with our readers.