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Is Email Marketing Still Relevant
Posted by IMer | Posted in Internet Marketing | Posted on 27-01-2010
If you are wondering why there is a need to even ask this question, then you are seriously bringing up the rear concerning the some of the problems email marketers have been experiencing. “It is not what it used to be” wrote Willie Crawford, in his piece “The Real Death of Email Marketing”. He says further on: “I’ve talked to friends from over a year ago, who often confided in me that they sent out emails and got absolutely no response”.
You’d have to consider if your email list members even got your email, let alone read them.
Now days, it has been generally accepted by many that all businesses, both online and the traditional brick and mortar, stands on a shaky footing if its marketing approach is mostly stuck on email marketing.
Many of the expert internet marketers concur that this phenomenon is caused by email deliverability hitches. Today, emails basically don’t get delivered as much as they did a few years back because of the internet service providers efforts against spamming. Crawford proffers that “Email is being filtered so heavily today that often less than 20% of a large ezine mailing gets delivered.”
For my part, I also believe that email marketing is gradually becoming obsolete, so I assent with much of what Willie Crawford opined in his article. With a lot of superior platforms that are emerging that send information with the same, if not more power, than the customary mass email delivery, why must we go through the obstacles of emails getting filtered and blocked?
One of the programs that can be as useful and may even be a lot better than email marketing is the utilization of micro-blogging sites for instance, Twitter. Jason O’Connor describes numerous techniques to effectively use Twitter as an internet marketing tool in his article “Top Ten Ways To Use Twitter For Marketing”.
One of the most effective things we could use microblogging sites comparable Twitter, according to O’Connor, consist of taking advantage of Twitter “to promote new pieces of content you and your company create to drive traffic to your site,” by tweeting links to your company’s valuable “online articles, blog posts, videos and webinars.” The article also included a technique to develop your organization’s Twitter followers by utilizing Twitter’s search function to find Twitter followers that have an interest in the products your company sells.
But O’Connor informs us not to exploit Twitter by just posting links to advertisements for your products. “It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services and affiliate links,” he wrote. “Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only rarely should you try to make use of Twitter to promote something. “Otherwise, you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.”
But there’s a micro-blogging site like Twitter that welcomes advertisement with open arms. Wille Crawford (going back to his article) indicated a website that “is built on a platform that looks and feels a lot like Twitter, except that it’s built for marketers.” The site is called Sokule, (pronounced “so cool”) and it supports its members to sell on the site. SoKule suggests a way out to the email marketing predicament by permiting upgraded members to “direct message ALL of their followers a maximum of once every three days. That means that in a very real way, when you build a following on SoKule, you ARE building a list.”
Twitter is well-known. SoKule is not as famous. Twitter has millions of members. SoKule probably has lesser numbers. Beware of being branded as a spammer with Twitter. Market as much as you want with SoKule. Go for just one or sign up with both. What matters mainly is that your business gets as much advertising as it can when the time comes for email marketing to disappear gradually.
Follow me on Twitter.com/legalbear See you there. 
