Will social media eventually take over direct email?
Posted by Manuela Barreto @ June 29th, 2009 in Other Marketing
A new survey by StrongMail Systems was recently revealed by MediaPost explaining how social media has emerged as a direct marketing channel and how both email marketing and social media are being simultaneously used as part of a company’s’ online marketing plan.
Even though many declare direct marketing techniques, as email marketing, to be obsolete due to its lack of engagement, marketers are not entirely excluding such activity from their marketing strategies. It’s been around for a while, longer than microblogging and paid search, however one downfall as we know is that it has a bad spam reputation.
One thing that still holds true for direct emailing is that its cheap, tangible and measurable. Forrester recently estimated that by 2014 we will be receiving 9,000 more marketing mails, this meaning, 24 more emails per day will come into our inboxes.
Back to the aforementioned research, the data was collected through 500 marketers who responded to an online survey from May to June 2009. One of the main findings was that 66% of marketers are planning to integrate the two channels in 2009 and, 48% who have already formulated a strategy for achieving this initiative. Of marketers planning to increase budgets in 2009, 83% will increase spend in email marketing, followed by social media at 62%.
I’d like to leave marketers with a few tips from Forrester on what marketers should do in their future email direct marketing campaigns:
- Segmentation of mailing lists. Never assume that all email recipients have the same interests. The more specialized lists you have, the better. You send more emails in smaller list sizes, but to more targeted audience.
- Increase integration with social media. This calls for more integration between emails and say, Facebook, in spreading the whole message. Other initiatives include share to social calls to action links and buttons.
- Maintain clean lists. It’s always been an email’s best practice to keep mailing lists cleansed from bounce, non-existent, malformed and duplicate emails.
Do you apply both strategies in your company? Which do you consider to be more engaging?
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Comments
Payal
July 27th, 2009
Good thing found at your blog about email marketing! Welldone! You have placed a good information on your blog. But, I want to talk something more about email marketing. Actually, it is not too easy as it seems. Most of the people are under misconception that collecting email IDs and using a bulk email sender can make you successful. But it is not. What do you think? Actually, most of the businesses these days are not selling one product. They are selling different products for diff. niches and for the different markets. So, in this case they should have the different lists of bulk email IDs. Email Marketing is being difficult in these days. But still experiments are being done by a lot of people and companies. I usually keep on trying the products of the different companies. Now a days, some wonderful products are coming in the market that can give you great earning opportunities. I do not want my comment considered as spam here so will not discuss about my blog, but if you visit my blog then you will find, how I am using different products for my email marketing these days and making a lot Really! When I found your blog about email marketing, It was great one and I could not stop myself writing comment? But, last thing, I want to ask, Do you offer newsletter to your visitors or not? Do you know any kind of program to make effective newsletter? Waiting for reply – Thanks – Regards
m.barreto
August 24th, 2009
Hi Payal,
thanks for your comments.
I agree with you, email marketing is definitely not an easy task as it may seem for some.
However, if done right, a well-crafted email campaign can be a very effective technique to bring in
new clients and really target the right market.
We do have a monthly newsletter that we send to our partners and clients– you can subscribe
to it through our 77Lab website, you will find the subscription request on the sidebar at the right.
Let us know what you think..
thanks for stopping by!
Google Wave
September 30th, 2009
[...] Email marketing in particular still remains as a cheap, tangible and measurable form or direct marketing and as Forrester recently estimated, by 2014 we will be receiving 9,000 more marketing mails, this meaning, 24 more emails per day will come into our inboxes. However, this can only prove to be efficient when it engages with the recipient and captures its attention. [...]