Email marketing, now referred to as a more “traditional” kind of online marketing (how fast things change!), is still relevant and useful, despite the overload on Social Media tools.  Social media gives you the ability to be where your potential and current customers are, but email campaigns still provide a unique ability to directly contact those people.

The downside to email campaigns, as we all know, is that they often feel, well, like spam. And its awfully hard to argue against that when you are sending those emails to everyone on your contact list from the past 10 years who hasn’t unsusbcribed, which numbers in the thousands at least. Yeah, sounds like spam. BUT we still want to be able to know that the information is going directly to those people. Social media lets you put the information out there, but you don’t know who sees it or how viral its becoming (well, Twitter has the #hashtag).

Hmm. Can we combine some of these ideas to make email campaigns better? Marc Munier of Econsultancy thinks blogs, Twitter, and Facebook all have features and capabilities which can be applied to email campaigns.

Blogs that are posted regularly have better readership and followers; this thinking can apply to emails and building up that relationship. Your emails, like blogs, should provide value and information to the audience-this will ensure continued subscriptions and greater returns. Finally, Marc Munier stresses that the replies to your emails are your way to communicate and you cannot ignore those replies, the same way a blogger cannot ignore his comments and expect those people to stay around.

As far as Twitter goes, keep in mind that people’s attention spans are short and design your emails that way. Email enables people to take another action, it’s not the final step, so your emails need to always urge people to take action and this will come from a concise email. Also, being open is key in social media, so take a tip and don’t be afraid to put “Unsubscribe” at the top of the email. It will give you more credibility and, let’s face it, the unsubscribers aren’t going to take action anyways, so let them go!

Munier describes Facebook as lacking in many areas (which I agree with), but Facebook’s flaws helps us realize that we need more than one chanel to accomplish our marketing goals. Email can be used together with other channels and tools to better reach and communicate with your targeted audience. So mesh the “traditional” email marketing with the benefits of the new social media tools and send out some rockin’ email campaigns!