Will Social Media Marketing Replace Email Marketing?

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Category: Online Marketing

Published on Tuesday, 19 March 2013 14:03

Written by Tom

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If you are among those thinking of employing an email marketing program but are not sure whether it is better you spend your resources in expanding social network programs. Or if you are considering reducing the number of email you send in order to place your focus on social network, this article will closely dissect whether social network is replacing email or not. However, before we go into that let us first define what email and social network marketing means.

Email marketing

Email marketing involves the direct marketing of a commercial message to a specific group of people through the use of email. From a broad outlook we can say, every mail sent to a potential or current client can be termed as email marketing. It involves the use of email to send business ads, solicit sales or business all focused in building loyalty, trust as well as brand awareness.

Social media marketing

This specializes in the use of social media sites to gain web traffic or attention. Social media marketing mostly focuses on efforts to come up with attention catching content as well as encourage readers to share the content on their social networks. A corporate message is spread from one user to another and apparently resonates as users view it as trusted third-party information as opposed to the brand name or the company itself.

Will social media marketing replace email marketing?

Before the rise of social media, communicating with your users and customers was much easier. Most of them frequently read email. However, currently people spend less time in their email inbox and more on social networks hence the conception that social media might replace email marketing. So will social media marketing replace email marketing?

One of the most important reasons why social media marketing should not replace your email marketing program in skill is because of increase in viability when it comes to direct response marketing. Users in both environments behave differently in that: in an email environment assuming that the email you sent gets opened, the user is solely engaged in going through that information without outside distractions. However, in a social network environment it more difficult to generate direct response action. Though there are companies who have reported success in social media marketing, others have experienced challenges in converting the users into revenue. This is because users in social networks are there to explore information and interact with other users.

A few years ago when MySpace evolved, everyone thought it would last forever but that was not so. The fact that we believe that Facebook, twitter or other social networking sites will not be abandoned does not mean when a better option comes along people will not grab it and when that happens you will have to build your social network from scratch. The fact that people can change email address, everyone knows that's not frequent and when they do they still maintain the old addresses.