Email Marketing is Here to Stay Millenials

Why Email Marketing is Here to Stay, No Matter What the Millenials Think

The rapid rise of social media and the potential it offers businesses for easily connecting with their customers and keeping them engaged, has prompted an eyebrow-raiser of a question: have these platforms pushed email marketing to extinction?

It’s a good question. Email is, after all, one of the oldest aspects of the web, and it’s a natural assumption that as things evolve, the older ways become less useful, less relevant, and less necessary. But for those businesses that still heavily rely on email marketing and invest a good deal of their dollars into a well-run, well-executed campaign, you can breathe easy. Email marketing is here to stay.

Despite the ease and efficiency of social media and its ability to instantly convey real-time updates to an audience, no matter how popular and widely utilized a platform maybe, there are always those who refuse to embrace it. There will always be individuals who can’t be bothered to sign up for Facebook, couldn’t care less about Twitter, and don’t have the slightest clue as to what Pinterest does.

But email is a common factor across the web. Just about anyone who spends more than five minutes per week online has an email address – seriously, think about how hard it would be to get by without one these days. There’s a huge audience here, and a significant chunk of this audience may be missing from the major social media platforms to which businesses have been paying much more attention, as opposed to email.

So there’s the audience factor. But why is email marketing any different? Who cares if you miss a few folks here and there? Won’t they find out through word of mouth or other forms of marketing?

Maybe. But that’s a moderate risk to take, isn’t it? And consider this: the nature of social media generally means fast, sporadic updates or links to a single piece of content – it means quick and targeted, because the general attention span of users checking their profiles demands as much. They want news, information and facts, easily accessed and in bits and bites.

Email marketing, on the other hand, lets you reach an audience that’s more engaged in what they’re reading. Your newsletter could contain ten different pieces of content that serve to inform your customer base of several important things about your business at once, rather than a status update that contains one link to a new blog post or a tweet that says something simple about a sale you’re offering.

With email marketing, you have the power to lay out a well-designed newsletter and tell your customers everything they want and need to know about your business and what’s going on there over the next month. Rather than reaching out for fast and easy sales calls or marketing efforts that skim the surface, you’re working to build longer-term relationships, offering readers a look at everything from discounts and deals to upcoming events you’re hosting to where they can download your latest piece of content and how provides value to their customer experience.

Social media may have exploded in the past decade, but it still can’t offer the same depth as email marketing. When it comes to keeping customers up-to-date for the long haul and providing a single source with everything they need to know about your business and how it can meet their needs, email marketing remains king.

What do you think? Do you consider email marketing to be dead? Do you use email for your business?

We’d love to hear your thoughts!