Email marketing in the time of social media

Ironically, the increase of social networking sites and social media have caused email volumes to soar rather than decline. What’s more, industry research shows that many internet users check their email before they do anything else when they wake up in the morning.

In a current study release by the US Direct Marketing Association, it was shown that email delivers the best ROI against all the other online marketing options, including social media.

The fact is that email still plays a central role in most users’ online lives, but marketers have not yet caught up to how much its role has changed in the past five years. There are higher email volumes than ever before, which means that content requires to be highly targeted and relevant to break through the noise.

Email is still a channel that offers enormous reach and flexibility for marketers, but we do need to use it in a more engaging and sophisticated manner if we are to create the most of its potential in a socially networked world.

Companies need to align their social media and email campaigns more closely than they have to date. For example, they should create it simpler for their customers to share email promotions via Twitter and Facebook than most do at the moment.

They also need to tap into the psychology of the active online user who likes to be first with main news or interesting special offers.