Social email marketing is very ‘hot’ in some countries, such as the US and the UK, while in many other countries, including the one I come from, social email marketing doesn’t seem to ring a bell yet – except with the marketing fanatics of course.
Recently I even talked to a local email marketer who really is good and who has a great ESP/MAP platform who told me that he read a lot on the web about social email marketing these days and he didn’t mean on local websites… So he was just beginning to hear about it.
It’s fair to say that, although social email marketing is not really that new, it is rapidly growing into one of the most important evolutions in the email marketing space.
This should not come as a surprise. As numerous surveys and reports show, marketers are planning to invest big time in social media in 2010 on the condition that they can also measure the results. And we’re not talking click-through rates or number of followers or fans here but the bottom line.
However, these same surveys and reports also show that email marketing is very alive and kicking, and that it remains the number one tactic for customer engagement and the undisputed number one channel for both businesses and customers to communicate in the online world.
However, social media are growing at an incredible pace and marketers worldwide see that something is going on there.
Social email marketing is about customer value
The question is not if email is going to die soon. And it’s not if you should jump on the social media wagon with your eyes closed.
It is how you are going to leverage all these media and channels to benefit from the advantages of both and most of all to create value for your company and your customers by being there where they are, regardless the medium.
In the end that’s what social email marketing is about too. It is about combining powerful communication channels to obtain a broader reach with relevant and valuable stories but most of all to be there where the digital customer is when he needs you.
Social email marketing is not ‘old meets new’, it’s a natural evolution whereby email marketing – just like CRM and online media – get more social too.
This evolution is nothing to be excited or worried about, it is something to benefit from and to make your customers benefit from.
Social email marketing is something that will continue to evolve the coming years.
Not because some smart marketer coined a new buzzword but because customer centricity and the network society make it inevitable.
And for those who still doubt about the network society: the concept exists since 1991, 2010 is right behind the corner.
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