Email Marketing Strategy: Twitter and email… will Twitter substitute email?

There’s mounting evidence that social networks are pulling certain audience segments away from the email inbox, and the numbers indicate it’s not just the Millennials, or Generation Y. JupiterResearch reported in a past study that  22 percent of email users say they use social networking sites instead of email. And there have been reports that in certain countries, social network sites such as Facebook receive more Internet traffic than email sites Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.

Though change is inevitable, most industry analysts and experts agree that email marketing won’t be going away anytime soon. A recent Pew Research Center Study “Millenials, a portrait of Generation Next” reported  that some 8% of all adults use Twitter. According to research by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, use of Twitter and online status updating increased from 2008 to 2009 but has leveled off since fall 2009.  Roughly comparable proportions of Millennials (14%) and Gen Xers (10%) use Twitter. By comparison, only 6% of Boomers and 1% of Silents use Twitter while in another survey they reported that 92 percent of adult Internet users send or read email — far more than regularly visit any social network.

Email is simply too valuable a marketing channel to disappear or even diminish. Forrester Research projects that email marketing will grow to more than $4 billion by 2012.

But new technologies that combine the rich reporting capabilities of email with the viral, consumer oriented nature of social networking have arrived to make reaching out to customers and their friends through social networks easier, allowing progressive marketers to enjoy the benefits of both. Professional tools are merging email marketing with social media which comes as a great help for marketers; being able to manage such a wide sprectrum of channels has become a challenge and tolls that help with this task are positioning themselves as invaluable for all online marketing managers.

In fact, a few companies are making it easier than ever to enable both email recipients and landing page visitors to post their favorite messages on social network sites, but the ones that do, the ones that invest time on developing a strategy that considers email marketing, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and a blog, are in far better position than their competitors. Such new technologies allow marketers to combine the power of email with the reach of social networking sites to engage with customers, friends of customers and friends‐of‐friends of customers.

One thing is for sure: combining all elements into an effective strategy requires skills, knowledge and experience, it is not a do-it-youself thing unless your business provides your with so much free time that you can transit through the learning curve that this strategies require so, if you want an effective campaign, seek the help of professionals.

..tomorrow we wil post on: Email Marketing Strategy: the email, blog, social media cycle is a winning Internet Marketing Strategy… To be on top of frequent email marketing info, follow @3emailmarketing in Twitter.