Comm100 analyses email marketing and social media and explain why email marketing is more important than ever in a socially-networked landscape.

1. Comm100 Analysis: Email Marketing and Social Media
Social media have become an important part of the internet and online marketing landscape in the last
decade. How do social media impact email marketing, and is email marketing still relevant in a world full
of social networks? In this section, we analyze email marketing and social media and explain why email
marketing is more important than ever in a socially-networked landscape.
There are an increasing number of social media networks that, at one time or another, dominated
internet traffic. Of course, marketing via social media has increased too, which is an obvious necessity
since so many consumers and customers spend so much time on social media sites. Does it make sense
for you to allocate all of your marketing resources to social media? No! Email marketing is still a very
important part of any complete web marketing strategy. Of course, in the socially-networked world,
you'll need to combine your email marketing and social media marketing strategies together to meet
different goals. Here are some tips and advice on how and why to merge email marketing and social
media strategies.
Email Marketing Still Provides the Highest Return on Investment
The reality is that of all the studies and surveys of top marketers , one statistic remains true – no matter
how big the social media networks have gotten, email marketing still returns the greatest return on
investment. This makes sense when you think about how little overhead or time it can take to send an
extremely targeted email to a very specific group of customers or users. If for no other reason than
because you are a smart business person who appreciates the importance of a strong ROI number, email
marketing should be at the top of your list of important direct sales and marketing communications
channels.
Consumers and Users Do Not Switch Email Addresses – But They Do Migrate
Social Media
Do you remember MySpace? What? You don't? But that was just a handful of years ago when MySpace
was the most popular destination on the internet (other than Google) and everybody had a MySpace
profile and spent hours every day on the dominant social media site. Then, of course, Facebook arrived
and became wildly more popular. At the time of this writing, it seems unthinkable that anything would
take over Facebook's position, but it's entirely possible that, by the time that you read this, Google Plus
will be the social network that everybody spends all of their time on. If there is one thing that seems to
be true of social media, it is that users will eventually migrate to another social network.
That, however, is not true of email addresses. Certainly, sometimes people change their email address.
But more frequently they simply add a secondary email address and use their older email address less
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2. often or for different purposes. And, even if they don't check it daily, most people still check their old
email address at least periodically.
An email address isn't as permanent as a postal address, but once you have a customer's email address ,
you have a fairly assured way of getting a message in front of that customer. Changing email addresses
is cumbersome. You need to notify all of the people whom you email with regularly and you lose what is
often an emotional email history. Unlike social media, which have so far proven to be transient at best,
an email address is an almost assured way to be able to reach most customers or users eventually if not
immediately.
Messages Do Not Disappear from Inboxes
Once you send an email marketing message to a consumer, customer or user, that message remains in
that individual's email inbox until the individual either reads it or actively chooses to delete it. That
means that even if the user hasn't read the email, your email subject line is still there in the inbox
reminding the user of their relationship with your brand. A message on a social media is not permanent.
Once you post a message, you are reliant on your user or consumer being logged into the social media in
a time frame that allows them to see the posting. No matter how many times per day your business
makes updates, you may not get the message across to a large group of your desired consumers.
However, whether it's actually read or not, email gets to your user or customer and reminds them of
their relationship with you.
Email Marketing is Targeted while Social Media is "One Size Fits All"
The nature of social media is to protect a certain degree of privacy. Additionally, people do not always
provide the most truthful information about themselves on a social media network. However, your
email marketing database contains information that allows you to segment and target communications
based on facts such as purchasing history, gender, age, and even geographic location. The most effective
marketing messages are the most targeted marketing messages. Social media and social networks do
not allow you to target messages effectively.
Social Media is a Brand Engagement Tool, Not a Direct Sales Tool.
At the heart of the matter, however, is the role of social media in your marketing strategy. Most
marketing experts agree on one thing – social media is a branding tool, not a direct sales tool. A great
part of the reason that email marketing continues to deliver the highest return on investment of all
marketing channels is that how users behave on social media networks does not translate into direct
sales. Social media users gather information and discuss products, they don't necessarily buy products.
Social media is important for brand engagement. It is not, however, typically a direct sales channel like
email marketing is.
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3. Email Marketing and Social Media Need to Work Together
Any good marketing plan is a comprehensive marketing plan. That means that your email marketing and
social media platform should work together. There should be opportunities for users to share email
contents via social media networks and opportunities for users to join your email marketing list via
social media. One strategy does not mean that the other strategy doesn't need to exist. However, the
existence of social media networks certainly does not take away the need for a strong email marketing
program and strategy!
No matter what email marketing strategy you are taking, the first step to ensure a successful email
campaign is to choose a reliable email sending partner. Comm100 offers you powerful Email Marketing
Software, which is both a great long-term and short-term solution to improving your email marketing
program to a new level. For more information please visit : http://emailmarketing.comm100.com/
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