Not too long back, email was the technology of the moment. After only a few months, people were already wondering how they ever managed with the traditional snail mail, and email mania soon swept up everyone, from kids right through to grandmas and everybody in-between.
As society has continued to speed forward and respond to the needs of the newest generation, we have seen the steady rise of social networking. Facebook was initially a phenomenon for university students, when I first joined only a handful of universities had been hit by the craze for ‘Facebooking’, and yet within months its popularity had spread like wildfire. Soon it was no longer a way for young people to keep in touch with their friends, it was a way for the older generation to rediscover old relationships, a way to make friends with people you’d not yet met and, perhaps most telling, a way for businesses to interact with their marketplace.
Social networking has become a key aspect of marketing, giving businesses a cost effective way to reach a larger audience and develop their brand. Many companies now, large and small, have at the very least a Facebook and Twitter profile. Naturally, these work best for B2C companies, but there are still plenty of benefits to be had for companies with a business market too.
Despite the introduction of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and most recently, Google Buzz, (to name just a few), email is still a very important part of the marketing mix. In fact, despite what some may say, social networking has actually placed even more importance upon emails.
It’s strange to me that people feel it necessary to choose their favourite digital channel and stick to it (as though you can only use one or the other). Surely, the very point of technology is to build upon what you already have, in order to provide the strongest and most extensive platform on which to market your product/service.
There is a mutually beneficial relationship to be had between social networks and email. Both can help the other to thrive, and together they give you a dual route through to your market. Whilst many have forecast the decline of email, in reality there is room for them both.
It’s usual for companies, and people, to join more than one social network and so most of us use email alerts to tell us when things have been written or posted on to our profile. Can you imagine the amount of time and effort it would take to constantly check every site individually? But more important than its role as alerter, email also has the potential to grow our social network. Many emails now include links to the network sites, encouraging people to follow your company in another way. Articles/newsletters no longer rely on the ‘forward to a friend’ link, but instead give you the option to ‘share this’, allowing them to be posted straight onto other people’s profiles on networking sites – placing your company in front of a whole new audience made up of that person’s friends and followers.
Social networks are a good way to get to know your customers in a more personable way. They are great for sending out mass updates, and their ability to let you send and receive messages instantly is definitely a pro. However, email still offers important advantages. A lot of people like to feel that some thought has been put in to contacting them. Contacting large groups at once (e.g. using Twitter updates) seems less personal, and even sending a personal message from a networking site somehow appears to show less effort than the process of sending and addressing an email.
Email campaigns allow a level of targeting that is difficult to replicate online. Multiple email lists are able to be managed and saved along with additional information about each recipient. At the moment, tracking an email campaign is still more widely understood, and the analytics available offer more insight into your customers’ behaviour, than a social network campaign.
Reports have shown that, in contrast to people leaving email in favour of social networking, on average, users of such sites check their email much more frequently. This gives your marketing campaign much more chance of getting seen and opened.
So, email’s safe. It has not been upstaged but instead has become part of a rather fabulous double act. Who says you can’t have the best of both worlds?
