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Despite the fact that more and more businesses are using social media for marketing purposes, email is still alive and well. Pew Research reports that email and search remain the top activities users engage in when they go online. 92% use their email every day and figures from Monetate show that the average conversion rates for email marketing were 4.16% from April till June 2012, while conversion rates for social networks were 0.48%.
Email is still the tried and true marketing tool and the best email marketing software can help convert better than both social networks and search. However, there are issues with email: the volumes of daily received emails, spam filtering, complexity of email communication, relatively long response time, disassociation from context and others.
The move to social
While email is a good vehicle for some aspects of communication, there are others that only social tools provide. According to a recent study by IDC, most companies opt for social solutions to ask questions, get knowledge, communicate with colleagues, share and contribute ideas, create awareness about the company’s products and get feedback from customers in real time.The Worldwide Email Usage 2010-2014 Forecast predicts that email will reach 2.4 billion users worldwide by 2014. By then, email is expected to become social and be a more effective communication tool.
While a lot of companies have found ways to solve some of the email related issues by using quality email software, the future of email is believed to be social. Combining social tools with email may help businesses increase productivity and innovation and use email for its intended purpose – private communication, not in real time.
Getting started
Today, email clients like Gmail offer users the possibility to turn their email accounts into powerful social tools or, as email marketing experts put it, private social networks. Such a private social network may give the user a number of benefits, including app choices, filters, folders, labels, contact groups as well as plenty of storage for important data. Managing the social features of email accounts may help individuals and businesses share information with the targeted audience only and have more control over communication with customers in general.
Web communication is the key to increasing business productivity, marketers believe. While both email and social remain effective marketing tools, the integration of both may help optimize the way companies interact with customers and boost their marketing productivity in the future.
