Email and Social Media - part 2

Yesterday I posted about how email was generally in decline, seen as the old person's tool compared to the younger allure Social Media. But it doesn't have to be that way...

Email is great:

• It has almost instantaneous delivery to a specific known address that usually has a single person receiving & reading it.
• Email can be forwarded in a standard way (no strange and manual ‘re-tweeting’ to worry about)
• Email has instant delivery feedback loop – via ‘bounced’ reports
• You don’t need to be ‘friends’ with someone to receive it (and sometimes you may not even know them or like what they are sending you)
• And it is just as useful for B2B as well as B2C marketing.

Email is also apparently far more popular than Social Media Guru’s would have you believe. Looking at the eMarketer statistics [below] it’s clear that far more users subscribe to brand emails than ‘Like’ brands on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.

 

But it’s not a popularity contest between email and Social Media. Both now have their integrated role to play in the digital world. AWeber in its Email Marketing Customer Survey report last year (which has a primarily US-based SME customer base) found that almost 70% of small business marketers are employing some sort of social media tactics.

Perhaps more interestingly… a majority (77%) indicated that integrating email marketing and social media is either “very important” or “moderately important” to them.

I would therefore argue that there has never been a better time for email.

Perhaps that’s why Facebook is now giving people their own email addresses?