You may have seen some of the dire predictions:…
- Twitter will be the death of blogging.
- Social media will spell the end of email marketing.
Well, neither has come to pass; and our take is that neither will. In the case of blogging, what you now see is more and more blogs making it easier for their posts to be shared with friends on social networks, via those little icons at the bottom of every post. And bloggers are seeing new readers referred to their blogs via social networks. So far from killing blogging, social media has actually given it a pretty big boost.
As for email: Achinta Mitra sees a similar degree of synergy between it and social media. Posting on The Customer Collective, he cites several recent research studies in support…
AWeber’s “Email Marketing Customer Survey” uncovered the following plans for 2010:
- over half will post newsletter signup forms on social network pages such as Facebook;
- nearly 47% will broadcast blog posts to their email list, and will include “Follow us” links in their email messages;
- 44% will include “share” options in email messages, and will Tweet their newsletters.
In the second study, GetResponse tabulated over 5 million email messages sent by 19,000 of their customers (primarily small businesses), and found that…
- including social sharing options in emails increased click-through rates an average of 7.2% to 8.7%
- including at least three social sharing options boosted the rate to 11.2%
(The full study can be downloaded here …free, but requires registration.)
Even in the Industrial sector (which one might expect to lag in email and social-media adoption), Achinta cites GlobalSpec’s “2010 Industrial Marketing Trends” study, which determined that…
- E-mail is the most frequently used online marketing tactic, with 65% of manufacturers using in-house lists and 16% using rented or purchased lists;
- 68% of companies plan to increase spending on social media in 2010, with LinkedIn and Facebook the most popular social media applications.
All in all: no real evidence of the death of email; lots of data supporting the potential synergy between it and social media.
