E-MAIL is Social Media
There’s much ado these days about social networking and it being the end-all, be-all of marketing existence. Facebook! Pinterest! Twitter! Instagram! Google+! These networks will deliver us! They’re marketing powerhouses that will crush all before them!
Or not.
Because there’s one social network–the original social network–that beats them all hands-down.
E-MAIL.
Email, that’s right. It’s not fancy, it’s simple. It doesn’t come with a lot of bells and whistles, but nothing has the power to deliver a message with as much clarity or engage a customer in the way that email can.
“But Facebook is where all the people are!” Pfft. Email’s usership doesn’t just dwarf Facebook’s, it crushes it. Facebook, arguably the mightiest of all new media portals, has something on the order of 1.3 billion users. The number of people with email accounts–and accounts that they use EVERY DAY–approaches 3.7 billion.
“Email is still the most important thing most of us look at in the morning – before coffee, before we kiss our spouses, before we sometimes crawl out of bed – we check our email. We all know that social media and blogs are important – content (rather content in context) is the new digital currency of our professional and personal lives. However, when it comes time to make a strong CONNECTION with someone else it’s often an email (or a text) that does the trick.” -Raymon Ray, Technology Evangelist
E-MAIL is more social than social.
Email is social with focus. It provides a one-to-one communication channel in which you’re talking to one person. Facebook is bright and shiny and NOW, email is the thing that gets the job done. Email is the workhorse.
According to Constant Contact, 225 million people in the United States use email daily. 91% of internet users are between the ages of 18 and 64. In addition, according to Pew Research, 89% of adults read or use email daily. DAILY. Contrast that with the estimate that there are about 148 million users on Facebook in the United States … monthly.
The difference between Facebook (or any other sort of now, now, NOW social medium) is kinda like the fable about the ants and the grasshoppers. The grasshoppers were super fun. They were everyone’s best friend. A party. They wanted to play, they wanted to laze in the sunshine, they wanted to save work for later. While they were doing that, the ants were busting their humps getting ready for the coming winter. They were slow and steady, but they were putting the work in to get the job done right.
When winter came, the grasshoppers were totally SOL. The ants? They had toiled and done the heavy lifting and had gotten the job done without fanfare, without flash or dash, but with purpose, with thoroughness, and done solidly.
Facebook is kind of like that bunch of grasshoppers. Email is the workhorse. Email is trustworthy. Email is the ants.
Nielsen reported that consumers completely trust/somewhat emails they’ve signed up for 50% versus 36% for ads in social networks.
Facebook and its social cousins are flashy and get all the fanfare–everyone loves them. But it’s email that’s tried, that’s tested, that’s true. It’s the thing that will get the job done thoroughly and the thing that will have you sitting pretty at the end of the day.
Get social with the workhorse of marketing. Get business done right with the original social network. Get it done with Happy Grasshopper.
