Is the rise of social media the death of email marketing?
Posted by ariefSep 1
Email marketing has become a popular method of advertising for marketing products and services and creating brand awareness. Here at seoconsult.co.uk we know that there are many advantages of email marketing which is what makes it so common. Firstly it is a very accurate way of measuring responses as you can literally track each individual address which the information has been sent to. It is also easy to reach people at once, as opposed to traditional direct mail where a separate piece of information needs to be sent to each recipient. It is also less expensive in terms of print costs and labour, as to compose and send an email document is much less time consuming than hundreds or thousands of direct mail documents.
One major advantage to email marketing is that people generally check their emails on a daily basis and if you are dealing with people from a business sense, they are likely to be on their emails all day. That being said, the rise in social media and networking sites has seen a significant decrease in the use of emails as a communication method as people prefer to stay logged on to Facebook or Twitter all day rather than always be on their emails. With the facility to instant chat also being popular, people who would normally use emails in a more social way are choosing these other ways instead.
Where there is a decrease in users there is also a decrease in demand, and if people are not reading your e-marketing then you are not getting a good ROI. Of course, what a company can do in this instance is embark on a social media marketing strategy alongside search engine optimisation, however this does use more staff resource and can take more time before any return is noticed. The problem is that doing nothing will not fix the problem.
In an attempt to bring email marketing back to where it was and keep it an effective marketing tool, online marketers are looking at ways of making emails more appealing again. The only way that this can be done is to make them more attractive and innovative so that recipients are more interested in reading them. The first approach for this is by adding video content to emails.
This strategy might not seem particularly new and fresh; however video content within email marketing has not been something which has been done on a large scale previously. There are so many benefits to including videos within emails, particularly if they are catchy and entertaining. Of course the same rule applies in email content as with any other content in the fact that you do not want readers to get bored. Email size is obviously a concern too, so to combat both these things it is a good idea to include either a title with a link to a video or a short snippet of the video to be linked to.
Nobody is trying to do away with social media marketing; however email marketing is so effective it would be a shame to see it go too. It is possible to see them working together along with SEO and link building to help your online profile reach its full potential.

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