E-Mail's Role in Social Media

Rory Carlyle is an Email-Geek, frequent twitter hound, web-analytics nut and an all around dweeb. With experience in consulting, agency work and as an Email Marketing Manager; Rory has seen issues regarding email from many perspectives. Continuing on a 6+ year march through all things interactive marketing with a strong affinity for email, Rory hopes to make the web a better place one inbox at a time. Outside of his email passion he fills his time with beer/food/books and the occasional flight to somewhere random.

Quite a few years have gone by since 2004, the year an article was put out by John C. Dvorak regarding the death of e-mail. Since then numerous articles have followed suit in 2007, 2008 as well as 2009. Each post has valid points and comparisons; most of these posts reference SPAM and online social vehicles for the diminishing usefulness of e-mail. While I would whole-heartedly agree that there are numerous reasons why e-mail may not be the prime vehicle for communication online, I would argue that e-mail is far from dead, maybe even still in its infancy.

E-mail today still plays a pivotal role within online communication, even within the social arena. The ‘social inbox’ is just another indication of how valuable e-mail is to users on social networks. David Daniels of Forrester released the US E-mail Marketing Forecast, 2009 To 2014 mid last year with a projection that e-mail will continue to grow for the next 4 years – at least. Spending in e-mail will increase to $2 billion. Peripheral research also suggests that “Social Networkers Still Love E-mail”, noting that 42% of social network users check their inboxes more that 4+ times a day. I would agree with that considering I leave my Gmail web client open all day to monitor my inbox and I’m an avid Twitter and Facebook user.

I predict, going forward e-mail will continue to play a large role in online marketing and social media. E-mail marketers are becoming smarter and better equipped to facilitate direct personalized communication to consumers; the usage of advanced list segmentation, behavioral targeting, and retention based automated deployments will all play a huge role of reducing e-mail clutter and becoming a huge tool for social networks to continue providing services to users.

My call-to-action for my fellow interactive marketers would be to embrace e-mail and leverage it into each and every marketing effort; social marketing will not eradicate e-mail marketing, it will only envelop it. E-mail marketing and e-mail in general is here to stay due to the start-to-finish measurability and fantastic ROI of the channel. Don’t believe for a second that e-mail is dead.

Thanks for listening to my blabbering; much thanks goes to Kyle Lacy for allowing me a guest spot on the blog. Viva la E-mail!

Connect with me @rorycarlyle