Here is a synopsis of post by Rohit Bhargava, Senior VP, Strategy & Marketing with Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, Marketing To The Sadly Underappreciated Email Inbox:
As marketers slowly turn to using social media as a greater part of their marketing, it is easy to think that the importance of email will start to fade. I believe it won’t. In fact, I think that social media in many ways is making email even more important because it is the glue that holds much of our personal interactions through multiple sites together.
Here are the reasons why I think the inbox is still the golden choice for not just interacting with people, but also vital to supporting the growing landscape of social media…
1. Email represents a private “home base.” On most social networks there are two choices for your profile – you can make it private or public.Email is the one place where you can have both simultaneously, a public email that you can share with people, while still keeping your identityand private details mostly hidden.
2. Notifications & alerts rise above the noise through email. If you use Twitter or Facebook or any other site, you can choose to get an alert sent to your email inbox when you receive a new message. For news topics (or self-Googling) you can set up a Google Alert to send you an email whenever your chosen topic is mentioned online.
3. It allows you to build a virtual archive of activity. Need to see an old interaction with someone or a product you ordered several months ago? Using email as a way to save all of your activities can be highly useful if you happen to need it at some point in the future.
4. Use email to control content creation and posting. Services like Posterous use email as the central hub for posting content as well, something that is increasingly being used as an easy way to get content posted online. You simply write your content (such as a blog post) into an email and send it to a specific address for it to be automatically posted.
There are likely other reasons why email will continue to be important – but as you build your next marketing campaign, one question you should ask yourself is how your target audience will relate to your message by email. For a base of consumers getting increasing better at ignoring you in all other channels, email may need to be your best tactic.
I would add a 5th reason to the above. As more and more people use social networking tools for much of their communications, email in-boxes will become less cluttered and provide a more prominent repository for opt-in marketing communications.
