With all the talk about social media platforms these days you would be forgiven for thinking that it was the only way to reach out to your collective audience; and with so many signing up to Twitter and Facebook as if they were the holy grail you might also be forgiven for thinking that email marketing was dead.  So really? What is the state of play? Are these new fangled social media platforms really the answer to everything?  Or are you missing a trick if you jump, hook line and sinker, at the expense of existing campaigns you run.

In reality, it should be pretty obvious that no one platform exists at the expense of any other.  With the advent of Facebook, one would assume that there would be no space for a service like Twitter, yet it continues to grow, even if it seems to be unable to monetise its service, and with this growth marketeers and online gurus are advising all and sundry to get in on the act and to promote themselves with it, and the same goes for Facebook.  These services though best allow you to engage with customers and interested parties, and partake in conversations with them, bolstering your image and brand as an enterprise or organisation.

Twitter is very much a transient platform.  Unless a user is highly organised they will likely completely miss any promotion you run, even more so if they follow a bunch of very active twitterers.  On Facebook you have a greater chance of being scene, but then again there is never a guarantee that this will be the case.  Email on the other hand, if run effectively and as an opt-in service properly, provides you a channel direct in front of an interested audience’s eyes.

Apple continues to spew out marketing emails on a monthly, if not weekly basis, and has done so ever since I can remember, going back to the text email days of the late 1990′s.  Other UK-based electronics retailers seem to have taken to emailing past and present customers daily with their latest deals and offers, and it never ceases to amaze me that I still receive promotional emails from hotels I haven’t stayed at in more than 5 years.  Yes I know I should simply “unsubscribe” but in reality, if I ever do end up going back to Singapore, I know which hotel will be at the forefront of my mind.  That’s effective marketing I suppose, and it’s not because of constant tweets or status updates!

It might be an ever increasing drag to keep up-to-date and whitelisted on the tech front when handling email campaigns yourself, but there are also great emails services such as Mail Chimp and Campaign Monitor, though they of course might be a tad on the expensive side if you are not generating serious sales from said campaign.  That being said, email campaigns are potentially more lucrative and definitely more effective in both reaching and converting your audience, given the fact that any opt-in process already shows an intent and definite interest in what you are offering!

And so with all that said, email campaigns are most certainly NOT dead and are merely complemented by online social media platforms, which if anything enhance the online offering of your company and add to the opportunity to further build any email marketing list and potential audience.  So don’t forget to promote any marketing list you may have through them, and E-Consultancy’s Email Marketing: Six Steps to Improving Customer Engagement in 2010 gives plenty of food for thought.