Yesterday, Emailvision published a white paper, outlining the top ten trends for email marketing in 2010. I just downloaded it and will try to report more about it in the coming days. I must say though that I have to praise Emailvision since it states that “integrated email marketing is crucial in the survival of the fittest” and I couldn’t agree more.
Now, with integrated email marketing Emailvision of course does not only mean integration with social media, a topic I often tackle.
By the way: neither do I. It’s also about integration with mobile channels, web analytics, CRM, your overall marketing strategy, cloud services and much more.
By integrating email marketing and social media you are able to boost the performance of both
In this first post, however, I will look at it from the social media viewpoint. Emailvision writes that “email marketing and social media feed off each other”.
I quote from the report: “By integrating email marketing and social media you are able to boost the performance of both mediums. The integration is valuable for spreading the word and growing your list, and it helps build the network intelligently and virally”.
True. However, some ESPs and email marketers still think that email is solely about push and that integration with social media means more push because now they can spread their messages even further.
One word: w-r-o-n-g. Why? Because it is still a one-way mentality that does not take into account the people behind the email addresses and because some email marketers still don’t see that the days of broadcasting are o-v-e-r.
Email marketing is a part of an overall two-way marketing strategy
Of course there is still a broadcasting and push aspect to email marketing, I’m not dumb.
But if you don’t understand that email marketing is a part of an overall two-way marketing strategy where recipients, customers, etc. are key, you might just miss the boat.
Let me quote again from the Emailvision white paper: “newsletters and transactional email can have links to the company blog, Facebook or Twitter encouraging users to engage with the company actively”.
Sure, it’s also about “boosting performance” as Emailvision writes. But most of all it’s about engagement.
More to come. If you can’t wait: download the paper here and, as always, feel free to comment.
Join me in the Social Marketing Forum
I am just beginning to do some research on social email marketing. I believe it is an unexpected marriage made in heaven for email marketers.
Just thanked you for your nice words via Twitter, LaTease. Social media, aren’t they great? And combine them with other communication channels like email (but many more too) and look at what you get. You comment, I follow you on Twitter and thank you there and here (and that’s just the basic stuff) 🙂