A recent story on CNN.com reported that the Nielsen Company has found that, as of May 2010, people who use mobile phones spent “more time reading e-mail on their phones than any other Internet-enabled mobile activity (comprising 38.5 percent of mobile Internet time spent). Social media was a distant second (10.7 percent) and reading news/current events was third (7.2 percent).”
According to Nielsen, 31 percent of those in the U.S. with cell phones use smartphones. The survey giant also reported, according to CNN, that “only 37 percent of U.S. mobile users access the Web from their phones.”
So what does this mean to you? It means that contrary to some social media marketing experts (as even reported in the Wall Street Journal in October 2009), marketing to a prospect via e-mail is not dead.
In fact, Econsultancy.com (a leading online “community where the world’s digital marketing and ecommerce site professionals meet…”) opined back in November 2010 that
While it’s true that the storming popularity of social media continues to accelerate, there’s no indication that social media is replacing, or killing off email communication. In fact, email is very much alive and kicking…
Consumers, the Econsultancy.com article continued:
…now have a wider range of channels available to them, but there is little evidence to suggest they are tweeting instead of emailing, or that social media is replacing email. Twitter is effective for certain types of communication, as is email. Updating a status, for example, doesn’t leave much room for expressing a point of view or promoting the details of a campaign. It’s also worth noting that social media channels cannot function without an email address.
Three things we take away from all this:
1. Marketing effectively isn’t about using one channel and ignoring others. Successfully marketing for small business today should use a multi-channel approach (e-mail, social media, SEO, etc.)
2. E-mail still is a very effective marketing channel because it’s great for building long-term customer relationships.
3. The place e-mail marketing has in your marketing mix is changing. Because your target audience is receiving and sending more e-mails over time, it’s going to be more and more imperative that marketers keep those e-mail relevant and personal.
Have you started an e-mail campaign? Is it effective? If not, or if you’d like to start tapping into this lucrative marketing niche, contact GoiMarketing. We look forward to hearing from you.
