| If the budget, timeline and resources warrant it, a
combination of both sets of tactics can be very appropriate.
It makes no sense to ignore traditional media in favor of
blogger relations for example.
Why do I think that traditional email, if
properly used, can be as or more effective than social media
when it comes to effective online marketing communications?
Here my main reasons why:
Direct
Email is direct. It gets
directly in your inbox just like your bank statement and
your boss report. Unless it falls in your spam inbox
automatically, there is little you can do to miss it. In
fact, most social media networks reach out with their
messaging and invitations to engage with you via your own
very email.
Attention Catcher
Email is a
great attention catcher. Your email subject
is your first hook into this, and as you well know by now,
it doesn't just take to scream something in capital letters
to avoid your subscriber fast moving finger sending your
message straight into the trash bin in no time at all.
Undivided Attention
Once you
have gotten your reader eager and motivated
to open your email, you have her undivided attention for at
least a good number of seconds. If you can raise interest,
engage, involve your reader into a story that gives her
something of value, you suddenly have realized one of the
most powerful marketing challenges to be faced: having a
direct, one on one conversation with your customers. Once
you have them reading, you have their undivided attention at
a much higher degree than the attention level and focus a
reader may have on a web page, when his eye vision is
continually distracted by other colored visual elements
screaming for attention.
Private, Confidential
An email
remains a private conversation between you
and someone else. It is not a public statement you make in
front of everyone else to draw attention or make yourself
look good. Email is like inviting someone you meet at a
party to come and talk to you in a separate room. Social
media marketing is chatting with him in front of everyone
else. Though there may be nothing so secret that may warrant
such privacy, the psychological implications of talking to
someone privately and directly are quite powerful. Think of
it.
Familiar
Email feels
like a familiar place. While all kind of
undesired intruders can get access to it, email still feels
like a personal, intimate place where important stuff, that
needs to be checked quite often, passes through. This, by
the definition itself, seems to be a good enough reason to
engage this communication channel in ways that utilize best
elements of what we have learned so far about online
communication.
Interactive
Email
remains a two-way medium. Notwithstanding
the bad use that much direct marketing has made of email for
its campaigns, email remains a full two-way conversational
medium. You can use it to fire out announcements, promotions
and news of all kinds, but unless you use emails innate
ability to let two parties have a conversation, you may be
losing on one of emails key strengths.
What else am I forgetting?
Help me out.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Email is a
preferred communication channel most of us
use avidly. Too eagerly discounting email potential as
uniquely powerful tool from the negative experiences of junk
email and spam as well as from the persistent mass media
communication approach utilized by many commercial companies
rather leaves an enormous opportunity for email to be
leveraged in many new creative ways to communicate
effectively with your customers and raving fans.
"A traditional brick and mortar
company with an older target audience may be more
hard-pressed to invest in marketing initiatives that
have no clear-cut ROI. A new tech startup targeting
teens and young adults may want to invest in viral web
apps and establish a strong presence in the online
communities where their audience hangs out."
(Source:
Lorna Li)
The idea
that social media is a better tool to
develop one on one relationships with other people is true
only to a certain degree. You can develop really powerful
one on one relationships via email as well.
Maybe what needs to be changed in your
email communication strategy is to inject more of a social
media, direct, spontaneous approach rather than the typical
traditional mass marketing approach of typical companies or
the outright recognizable spam communication approach.
What if
you built a social media communication strategy and then
used your newly developed community relationships to direct
market to them via email?
Or what if you used email to build your
social media marketing community? You could build an email
list of fans, supporter and raving fans and get them to get
together and explore your newly created online social
community.
From what I can see the issue stems from
seeing things too separately while not attempting to
contaminate them and to use the best parts of each one also
when using the other.
For example, direct marketers are more “push-oriented”,
while generally social media marketers try to slip their
messages in through the back door, in more elegant and
diplomatic ways, causing a so-called “pull effect”.
But it doesn't have to be
this way.
Nowhere it
is written that marketing emails need to be
written in a spammy style, or that they need to be targeted
and sent to audiences that have nothing in common with each
other. It is a false myth to believe that to have an impact
with direct email-based marketing approaches you need to
trick, lie or cheat to convince the reader to click on your
link offer.
And who knows, we maybe able to invent
further and more innovative ways to better mix the unique
traits of email with the powerful ones of social networks
and media.
What do you think? |
