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SOCIAL MARKETING MAY BE TRENDY, but email marketing remains the bedrock of customer communication for businesses. A recent online survey of U.S. marketers by ClickSquared, a provider of email and cross-channel database marketing solutions, and the Relevancy Group, a digital marketing consultancy and market research provider, found that 77% of the 365 respondents were marketing via email--the No. 1 answer. The survey, "Connecting Campaign Management Across Channels," determined that the second-most popular tactic was print direct marketing, with 69% of respondents indicating they use it, followed by social marketing, at 65%.
There's a lot of attention on social media and search, but email marketing is still the workhorse of many marketing programs, said Michael Thompson, chief deliverability officer at ClickSquared. "It's how marketers deliver their primary messages and keep contacts in place," he said.
According to Laurence Rothman, senior consultant-brand and reputation at Nationwide Insurance, the reason email represents a significant portion of his company's marketing program is very simple: "It's because it works," he said. "Especially in the b-to-b space, people are on it all the time. I don't know anyone who's not walking around the office checking their BlackBerry."
Nationwide works with email marketing company ExactTarget to market to an audience of insurance agents, wholesalers and brokers via different types of email. Social media is increasingly important, and Nationwide has a significant search presence, Rothman said, but nothing has replaced email as a way to connect directly with customers. "When you're dealing with b-to-b accounts that can be worth a lot individually, you want to build that personal relationship, and email can do that," he said.
Email may be widely used and, for many marketers, very effective, but it still comes with challenges. For one, there's still a fine line between use and overuse of email. Regrettably, Thompson said, some marketers have crossed that line since the economic downturn due to pressure from management to generate revenue.
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