Econsultancy & Pure360: What can email marketing learn from social media?

"Just had a “conversation” with our shiny new marketing manager of the benefits of social vs email marketing. Wish I had a tape recorder (doesn’t that sound dated, hmm iPhone anyone?) to hand as I think it encapsulates the position a lot of marketing managers find themselves in...

We are all of course excited by the opportunities that social media provides, but there seem to be as many fails as there are success stories (Habitat vs Barclaycard), which makes it hard to justify to yourself let alone to your board. I think this is because there are few experts in this field – after all it hasn’t really been around long enough for anyone to be classed as an expert.

Marketers are a little stuck, they know loads about 'tradigital' marketing (email marketing, PPC, and SEO) but don’t yet have enough access to proven social media wins to easily get buy in.

So I’ve been thinking about ways of taking the best bits of social media and incorporating them into Tradigital marketing channels – specifically email."...read on

Posted 18 August 2009 11:54am by Marc Munier of Pure360


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It's about time someone did this, trust Pure360 to do it and well. It looks like their new Marketing Manager is really moving things along. Lookout for her twitter link in the post.

In my humble opinion Social Media has now become a bit of a generic word - not as generic as' Mashup' but that is a whole other rant! There is so much social media nowand everything is used in different ways, it should be categorised but I won't do it here.
Facebook is not really much of a B2B channel - but B2C yes. In many ways for businesses it is like digital word of mouth, so it is quicker too. Where as Linkedin seems more for B2B Or am I wrong?

Email is the glue for all of it. You have control over what you get and what to do with it. Twitter and Linked in and Facebook will all email you to tell you that yo have new followers, contacts, friends, photos etc.

What social media has brought us is that controlled public interaction and at the same timed forced us to keep it short and to the point. It's a great way to share information consistently and give control to the readers while still letting them have their say and interact but because email is the private and personal inbox which is used for everything else - shopping, banking, bill payments etc. people will still check there more often, so sending emails to people when something new has happened so they only go there when they need to and allowing people, who prefer to watch than interact, to control the frequency and check when they like or get less email notifications grouping thing together.

Either way people still want the emails and you should profile these people and make sure you give them what they are interested in at a frequency that suits them and give them the chance to interact with you through which ever medium suits their convenience.