Email and social networks are complementary channels, and marketers who manage them in an integrated fashion will experience the best returns on their investments.
As brand owners turn to social networking sites and services as a marketing channel, many industry observers are beginning to question the role that email marketing will play in a Web 2.0 world. Some are even predicting that email will lose its central place in the online marketing world as budgets shift toward channels such as social networking sites and as marketers struggle more and more to reach their audiences through spam filters.
In reality, however, email marketing volumes are not declining, even in an environment where social networking sites like Facebook are enjoying exponential growth. If social networks were going to grow at the expense of email, we'd expect to have seen more impact on email budgets and volumes by now.
The simple reason that we haven't is that email and social networks do not compete with each other for online marketing spend or for end-users' attention. Instead, they complement each other and can be used in an integrated fashion to create better user engagement than either could on its own.
Email is still a central part of the average internet user's online experience, even with the explosive growth of social networking and instant messaging. For marketers, the fundamental value of email remains the same as it ever was: It allows them to reach and interact with their customers once they've left the website or retail context and encourage repeat traffic.
Indeed, most social networking environments depend heavily on email as a mechanism to drive repeat visits to their sites. In effect, they use email as a marketing and transactional vehicle in the same way that most organizations do.
Time for a rethink
Of course, that's not to say that marketers shouldn't be rethinking their approach to email in a world where brands need to participate in social networking environments. Companies will need to evolve the way that they use email by making better use of transactional and triggered emails that are relevant to the customers, rather than blasting them with untargeted promotional messages.
To be successful in social networking environments, one needs to engage with the audience in a much more tangible and ongoing way. A marketer can't simply review the demographics, the branding and the copy and then send off an email.
Email campaigns must be much more tightly integrated with the presence created in the environment and responsive to users' actions in that environment. A presence within a social networking environment, coupled with good analytics tools, can help marketers to ensure the content they deliver via email is relevant to their customers and prospects. However, marketers must remain mindful of privacy laws and concerns.
Marketers also need to deliver value to those that subscribe to and read their marketing emails by rewarding the readers. Marketers can deliver such value through useful information, a special offer or a chance to enter a competition, to name just a few examples.
Perhaps the most important factor of all is to measure one's marketing campaigns in an integrated fashion. This enables marketers to understand how their email and social networking marketing are interacting to drive engagement with their audience.
It feels like email marketing has been around forever, but it is still a relatively young channel that continues to grow and evolve at a rapid rate. Emerging channels such as social networking and mobile marketing will complement email, but email will remain a lynchpin for the foreseeable future.
By managing and measuring these channels in an integrated way, companies can understand how well their online campaigns are performing, reach customers wherever they are in an engaging manner and, ultimately, drive superior returns from their online marketing investments.
Renen Watermeyer is email management director at Acceleration.