What role does e-mail play in the current marketing context? From the recent “TNS Global Digital Life Research Project” that I discussed earlier because I liked the online campaign for the launch, it appears that people spend more time on social media than on e-mail. Obviously it is not the first time that such conclusions are made. For many people similar findings always lead to the conclusion that e-mail is dead. The question obviously remains if the increased use of social media by people, even at a disadvantage to e-mail usage, lowers the value of e-mail marketing. In my eyes this is still not the case. Although people indeed use social media in the ambit of contacts with businesses, especially in the customer service sphere (where e-mail and also telephone still rule) and on professional social networks, I personally still believe that e-mail is the most important digital medium for contacts between people and companies.

Will this ever change? I know that everything does eventually change. But I do not see it changing very quickly though. In the hectic environment that is the social media sphere, I have noticed that the e-mail inbox is actually some kind of intersection where many interactions between people mutually on the one hand, and between people and companies on the other hand, come together.

You receive direct messages from Twitter in your inbox, that also keeps you informed of activities in your LinkedIn groups, receives the commentaries on your blog posts, etc. It is a little as Carolyn Nye wrote last week in a blog post on The E-mail Guide: e-mail is a type of vein where everything comes together.

E-mail marketing is not dead but requires a cross-channel strategy

E-mail as interaction vehicle and as central inbox of a digital world is everything but dead. E-mail as a way to stay informed of promotions from your favourite brand, or of what is happening in news or surrounding a specific company, through promotional mails or newsletters, is under pressure: conversion ratios decrease. However, this is not so much due to the medium than to the way in which companies have not yet fully integrated e-mail marketing in a one-to-one cross-channel entirety whereby content and context are king and both are completely in function of the client (see this post about the fact that email still rules in content sharing and content in context).

E-mail marketing is not dead, bad e-mail marketing dies. Furthermore, this only applies for a number of forms of e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing is much more than the parts that are suffering from the effects of marketing pressure and marketing fatigue (check the white paper from our partner about that topic here). E-mail marketing is also still an issue of transactional e-mails (during online purchases), lead nurturing up to and including e-mail signatures.

As Carolyn justly said in her blog post, be careful with people who yell that “e-mail is dead”. Just as you should be aware of people who generalize and simplify in general.

Finally: it is not the channel that counts, but the correct combination of channels to realize specific valuable marketing activities for a relevant or emotionally satisfying experience for your specific clients.

E-mail plays an important role in the cross-channel reality, even more: it plays a crucial role.