As a big user of email, I have been somewhat skeptical of Social and Digital Media communication tools in their platforms. Yes, I am a big LinkedIn user, but I have it configured to that messages in LinkedIn come through my email. This article by Erika Murphy at Forbes confirmed some of my beliefs.
Score One for the Email Side
The Wall Street Journal raised hackles in the email marketing community almost two years ago when it declared email was dead. Technically what it said was that email was fast becoming less relevant and soon wouldn't be the dominate online medium by which people would communicate, but it might as well have taken out an obituary for the channel based on the fast and furious rebuttals that flew after the article ran.
But in such war of words, events always trump statistics: Like Ben & Jerry's decision to ditch email marketing in the UK in favor of social media marketing last year.
And, now, like Groupon customers' apparent helplessness when its service provider's servers in Las Vegas went dark.
In the old days, business shut down if your phone box went down, now it is email:
"Groupon has a great brand but it is not strong enough to survive without its email subscribers." Without the email, he concluded, Groupon wasn't able to generate nearly the same level of sales.
In our experience at ProActive, the same is true of investors. Email is intrusive and you have to react to it. The trick is to use it selectively in sending to investors. Too many emails and they push the "unsubscribe" button. Too few and it means that we are not getting client messages out for clients. As Fobes states:
But undoubtedly the main story line is this: without that email reminder, people didn't think to go looking for their deal. And that surely will make email marketers smile, even though it was one of their own that made Groupon go dark.
What we try to do at ProActive is to get very selective in what we send. We have 68,000+ emails in our growing database and we have "touched" those people either face to face or via our PRISM platform. The Hubspot platform also gives us a unique database tool that gives us data that can be very important to individual clients as the figure our their "Social Media Strategies."