Expedition Post

E-mail marketing is the best marketing channel whether:

1. you want to brand yourself as an expert
2. get more clients to your services business
3. get repeat business from your existing customers
4. convert  more of your website’s visitors into customers

Today there are a lot of ways to build an audience:

1. You can gather followers on twitter
2. You can write a blog
3. You can create a facebook page and have people sign up to it.
4. Create a myspace profile and get fans and friends who will receive your updates.

We hear a lot of news articles that say email is losing out to SMS, then we heard that email is losing out to social media and so on. Many have started peddling products that claim that social media is the best way to reach your audience and somehow email is falling out of fashion and is losing its effectiveness.

Social Media : Not Suited For All Audiences

These are the “latest” ways to get an audience and keep them. But following a blog through an RSS feed, creating a facebook account and joining a facebook page, creating a twitter account and adding users to it are all not simple tasks for the ordinary internet user. It requires a certain level of internet proficiency.

Lot of people use twitter just because it is the hip thing to do today, because their friends are doing it. It could be something else tomorrow. Remember MySpace? Before twitter and facebook, having a myspace page was the most hip “web 2.0” thing to do.

Social media is not new. It was always there – people were talking on bulletin boards way back in the early 1990s.

Email Will Always Be The Most Important Communication Channel

People increasingly prefer to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to have informal conversations with each other. But that doesn’t mean email is going to become obsolete any time soon.

Email is very deeply ingrained into our work culture and everyday life. Lot of important communication still relies on your email address. Your paypal account, your internet banking notifications, communication from your employer all need emails.

It will always be the most important communication channel because it will always be there. People will always need their email addresses to verify their user accounts which they are opening today and will keep 10 years from now. You can’t replace a communication channel like email with a company/website like facebook.

Sending and receiving an email is the first thing everyone learns when they learn to use the internet.  It has the least learning curve. People will write emails, and check them for a long time to come.

I joined twitter by peer pressure. I didn’t do it because I liked it when I first started using it. I joined facebook because lots of my friends were doing it too. It took me a while to actually *get* what the fuss about facebook really is. Twitter? I still don’t get it. The point is – I’m thinking if a very computerate guy like me can’t get it quickly, it is going to be hard for a lot of people to learn to use these sites.

You can always safely assume that your audience members have an email address. You can always talk to them via email.