With more and more emphasis put on social media in the marketing industry, is email marketing really the future?

Email Market

Email marketing has been evolving since its creation–and it is still changing today. The marketing industry must constantly adapt as new advertising channels continue to be created at stunning speeds. Add to that customers that are more savvy and demanding than ever before, and the marketing industry is up against hard odds. How can marketers innovate in such a demanding and fast-paced marketplace?

Customers today really want advertising that is valuable and specific to them. Instead of upping the amount of marketing put into customers’ inboxes, marketers are finding themselves diversifying their advertising channels, as well as utilizing data about specific customers to personalize the content each customer views.

Social Media

As email marketing plugs away, it is constantly competing against social media. Today almost every social media site has a way for users to quickly and privately speak to one another. Facebook’s messages and Twitter’s direct messages are two such examples. With social media networks as large as Facebook and Twitter, users are utilizing their personal email accounts less.

Can email marketing compete with social media avenues that are edging in on the email market? Perhaps. Email marketing has two unique benefits. First, as customers have opted-in to receive emails, they are more likely to act on the content they view. Second, email marketing has been show to effectively drive traffic to a company’s web presence, and generate sales.

But perhaps asking if email marketing is better than social media is not the correct way to think. Instead of asking which is better, many companies today are simply using all avenues of marketing at their disposal. To diversify is to market successfully.

The Teen Market

To look at the future, teen usage is very helpful. Teens today will be the market tomorrow. A recent Pew Research Center study showed that only 6% of teens today use email daily, and a whopping 39% never use email. The same study found that 76% of teens are on social media sites.

With this kind of data, one can speculate that the marketing industry will have to change in order to capture the attention of the next generation. As the majority of teens today enjoy fast and short ways to communicate, marketing in the future will probably be even more concise, direct, and personalized to keep the future buyer’s attention.

The Future

Email marketing will probably not kick the bucket anytime soon, but social media marketing is sure to be used more and more often to attract the youth of today. Furthermore, it is possible to imagine that email marketing will evolve into an entirely different kind of marketing tool in the future.