Why email marketing still works in a social media world

Email marketing is passe. Blogs are going the way of the dinosaurs. RSS feeds are yesterday’s news. We keep hearing such proclamations from marketers, marketing consultants and gurus, and even management consultants about how a particular technology or trend is fading. When I hear a technology declared dead though, I think that’s one we should invest in it.

As marketing consultants we often think we need to propose new, new things to remain relevant. We believe that if we reiterate points people will stop listening to us. The problem arises when a technology that is still valid, still powerful and still relevant falls prey to this mentality and gets ignored. Email marketing is one such.

Twitter, Facebook and other such media have been heralded for providing new and powerful ways to communicate. However their influence is yet to extend over businesses in a significant way. Email remains the primary way businesses communicate and is the main means by which businesses gather information. Within the realm of B2B marketing, email is still the most relevant tool for reaching the customer. Why?

Source : Eloqua

1. Deliverability

Compare the efficacy of email across different industries against other media like search, social, banner ads and others and we will see it has the highest reach among them all. Email marketing is also easy to implement and manage. If you have a decent content marketing strategy, implementing an email marketing campaign, setting a schedule and sending regular email communications or newsletters are all relatively easier than implementing a social media marketing strategy.

2. Cost-effectiveness

Email marketing is getting cheaper by the day, especially in terms of SaaS (software as a service) or hosted web applications like MailChimp and Campaign Monitor. Delivery of email, managing email databases, subscriber databases, and managing unsubscriptions are also getting easier and cheaper to add on to manage email marketing campaigns.

3. Email Marketing is Measurable

You can measure with up to 99% accuracy the delivery of email and click- throughs. In addition you can measure the traffic that you are directing to your website or landing page through email. From that you can measure its effectiveness using web analytics and not just email analytics. No other medium gives you this level of measurability and data to map your marketing campaign to its results.

The chart above provided by Eloqua gives us a look at the efficacy of email across regions. We can see in the context of Asia Pacific email deliverability and effectiveness is much higher than Europe or America.

Given the reasons we have laid out for the validity and the supporting data from eloqua on the efficacy of email marketing B2B marketers in Asia cannot afford to discount or neglect email marketing. It may be approaching ‘ancient’ in terms of the internet era but it remains indisputably relevant.