Social media marketing is exciting, ever-evolving, an unprecedented blend of personal and global scales, and seemingly unlimited in its potential knock the earth right off its axis. But email marketing is still more important to most small businesses, and needs to stay central in your Internet marketing strategy.

According to Web Pro News: “93% of people have a daily opt-in relationship with at least one consumer brand. 15% on Facebook. 4% on Twitter.”

So let’s take a look at some of the inherent advantages:

Market Value

The current marketplace shows that email is still just as highly-valued as social media. According to Forrester Research, American companies will spend $1.676 billion on email in 2012, compared to $1.649 billion on social media. So even if social media marketing has quickly gained traction, email marketing is still the bread and butter.

Choice

Like social media, email-marketing is an opt-in service. This means that your emails are going to people who want to receive them. But since email tends to be a more private, valued space than social media (say, compared to who you publicly “follow” on Twitter or “like” on Facebook), those opt-ins occupy even more advantageous real estate.

Statistical awareness

Similarly, these opt-ins provide excellent statistics for how many potential customers you’re reaching. Email marketing also allows for the ability to track how many people actually open the marketing emails sent to them, and how many people click through into your website. Emails forwarded to friends and colleagues could also be tracked.

Reliability

Unlike the perpetually in-flux nature social media marketing, email far more staid. It works perfectly well at getting people messages, and there’s little room for improvement or drastic change.

Take Google Mail, for example. Sure, the company keeps adding all sorts of nifty bells and whistles that can either add to the experience (if you like them) or entirely leave it unchanged (if you don’t). But when Google tried to completely reinvent email through their (incredible, yet unnecessary) Google Wave service—which it billed as “email if it were invented today”—the program flopped. There was just little need to improve an already good thing.

Importance

There’s still something a little bit sacred about the email box. I only opt-in to things I really want to know about. I don’t like it cluttered up with unread emails or stuff I don’t care about.

Why?

Because it has my attention. I’ll see every single email that lands in my inbox. Even on a day where I’m following Twitter or Facebook, I’ll still miss at least 30 percent of content that comes through those platforms. But I’ll see all of my email—and you can imagine why this matters to marketing.

According to a Nielsen study, 8.3 percent of all online time is spent checking email. According to Web Pro News, 74 percent of people said they felt pressure to respond to an email the same day they received it, compared to only 52 percent for Facebook messages, and only 26 percent for Twitter direct messages. Email simply matters more.
And at Masterlink, we’re helping pioneer the email marketing field. We boast a 95 percent delivery rate (vs. the 80 percent industry-wide standard), thanks in part to an innovative, customizable suite of services like:

• Tracking ability or statistics like click-thru rates and open rates.

• White listings with Internet service providers that, when combined, account for more than 70 percent of the consumer-level email market.

• Fully-customizable fields for personal information about each contact, including important personal touches like birthdays, account management histories, and zip codes.

• Segmentation ability, which lets you email follow-up messages to your clients and customers, based specifically on how they responded to the first email.

Contact our Dallas email marketing experts for more information.