In the current digital landscape, it’s easy to view the medium of email as something of a dinosaur. After all, more glamorous social networking platforms offer us the chance to socialise on a much wider scale instantly, allowing us to generate ‘conversations’ with friends rather than ‘broadcasting’ to them and then having to wait hours, sometimes days or even weeks, for a response.

This view is starting to become prevalent in the world of marketing too, with more and more businesses sidelining their email marketing campaigns in favour of social media marketing. Of course, social media marketing is an extremely effective way to get people talking about your brand and gain new customers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that email should be discounted. If anything, recent developments online mean that email marketing is as vital as ever.

If you already run an email marketing campaign, then you should already be aware of the benefits. For one, you should have a readymade list of customers who are willing to engage with your brand and are interested in what you’re doing – otherwise, they wouldn’t have signed up for your emails. You need to be taking advantage of that and offering them interesting, unique content on a regular basis.

There’s an element of exclusivity being on a mailing list offers over social media interaction, and you need to exploit this to keep customers interested in your brand as well as getting new subscribers on board for the unique content.

As social sharing has become the norm on the internet, the email has actually become one of the few areas online that is truly private. Email, when done right, can be more personal than social media, like receiving a letter from a friend. However, this privacy comes at a cost; you need to make sure you don’t betray your subscribers trust with spam and poor quality content.

Another reason you should be making the most of email marketing is the fact that almost everyone online has an email address. The people signed up for the social media you’re targeting? All had to sign up with an active email address. In simple terms, the potential audience for your email marketing campaign is huge, whereas not everyone online has fully got to grasps with social media yet. Also consider the fact that social network users will be spread across various platforms – although there are plenty of different email providers, email is a much more focused platform and therefore much easier to keep track of.

Using email as a marketing tool is also relatively cheap, both in terms of money and time, compared to marketing on social media and is much cheaper than paying for advertising, either online or in print. While you need to invest time in creating content and formatting your messages, reaching your subscriber list is as easy as scheduling a send date and then pressing send.

The metrics used to track success in email marketing – amount of subscribers, the amount of people opening, the amount of people unsubscribing – are also a lot easier to understand and prove you’re getting results than those used to measure success in other campaigns.

That’s not to say that you should neglect other forms of digital marketing – quite the opposite in fact, as you can use emails to promote your social media accounts and encourage sharing of your content while also encouraging followers on social media to subscribe to your emails. Email marketing is still vital to any good digital marketing campaign.

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in email marketing campaigns

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision (http://www.extravision.com), specialists in email marketing campaigns

Author Bio: Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in email marketing campaigns

Category: Marketing
Keywords: email marketing, email marketing campaigns