What will the integration of social networking and email mean for marketing?

Some big changes could be on the horizon for email. A surge of recent studies have questioned whether it remains fit for purpose due to its contribution to information overload. At the same time, the emergence of social networking is being hailed by some as a readymade alternative. And with Facebook having already announced a new integrated messaging service, the way that email is presented and used is potentially set to experience the biggest changes in its lifetime.

 

This of course has major implications not only for the way that businesses operate internally, but also the way that they communicate with their customers. Email presently accounts for 17% of the average digital marketing budget, according to Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Industry Census 2010 – up from 14% in 2009.

 

In another of its reports (‘How We Shop in 2010: Habits and Motivations of UK Consumers’) Econsultancy also indicates that email remains a potent marketing force for businesses – with 36% of consumers prompted into making an online purchase as a result of receiving an email, and 27% reporting that an email was the cause of an offline purchase. Understandably, given these statistics, many organisations have been closely monitoring email’s status, ever since changes were heralded by the arrival of Gmail’s priority inbox functionality earlier in the year.

 

"Email currently offers the lowest campaign costs for marketing purposes," says Simon Geach, sales director at BitDefender UK & Ireland. "Having companies move away from email marketing would be a costly business as they would have to build everything from scratch. This kind of migration would definitely have a negative impact on the business."

 

Problems relating to email were first highlighted in a number of studies, which revealed the discontent at growing volumes of email. A report by Spam Ratings, for instance, indicated that 6 in 10 adults suffer from spam stress, with 65% believing that email spam angers them.

 

Two-thirds of consumers, the report continued, said they are being drowned in spam from well-known and high street brands. And this abuse of the channel was unsurprisingly having a negative impact – 58% deleted emails from big brands/high street stores straight away while 49% of consumers said they were less likely to use and purchase from brands’ websites if they received unwanted emails.

 

 

Of course, similar facts have been reported throughout the lifetime of email. But the difference now is that social networking offers a convenient alternative communication channel. The alarm bells really went off with the arrival of a Nielsen NetView report which suggested that email usage had dropped 27% in the past 12 months - while the use of social networks had soared.

 

Only last month, Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner,  told attendees of the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2010 that the greater availability of social networking services will have a significant impact on email, with Basso forecasting that 20% of business users turning to social networks as their primary vehicle for interpersonal communications by 2014. But the implication that social networking could usurp email certainly rattled a few cages.

 

"With the seemingly endless reports about the death of email, it’s no wonder that the commonly-held myth of decreased email usage exists," says Nigel Arthur, managing director of ExactTarget UK. "The practice of ‘batch and blast’ email has become outdated among the sea of mobile and social media marketing alternatives, and to continue blanket sending to the same list of subscribers isn’t sustainable, even though it remains a quick-fix that too many brands favour. But most studies, specifically a recent report by Nielsen NetView, don’t take into account the fact that more and more consumers use desktop and mobile email clients to access their accounts through providers that still maintain webmail portals.

 

"Email usage’s percentage change highlighted by Nielsen is in direct contrast with ExactTarget’s 'Subscribers, Fans and Followers' research, where we asked if consumers used email more or less often between October 2009 and April 2010, and 25% of consumers said they were using email more often. Only 6% said they were using it less often. How consumers access email is changing, but the use of email continues to increase."

 

Anne Stagg, director of client services at more2, is in agreement. "It’s clear that there is a decrease in non-targeted mail, and this is a trend that is likely to continue as it has become apparent that irrelevant email blasts simply do not work," she suggests. "I wouldn’t necessarily say that email is in decline overall, but the way in which it’s being used is certainly changing."

 

"The social networking boom started a couple of years ago but despite this email has still remained a primary form of one-on-one conversation," adds Geach. "While social networking is great for interacting with customers, it may be unsuitable for solving complex issues."

 

 

But, intriguingly, Basso also predicted that the lines between social networking and email would blur in the future. "The rigid distinction between email and social networks will erode," she forecast. "Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer email capabilities."

 

Only weeks after this prediction, the announcement of Facebook’s unified messaging system was to add significant credence to this theory. The Messages system offers its 500m users @facebook.com email addresses and incorporates seamless messaging (organised by contact rather than date), integrated messaging (integrating Facebook messages, email and SMS) and a social inbox (one inbox for friends and one for ‘other’).

 

Email might not be dying, but it certainly was changing.

 

"The blogosphere is abuzz with tired arguments over whether or not social media signals the death of email," says Kristin Hersant vice president of corporate marketing, StrongMail. "What’s most interesting is that while the talking heads continue to debate the value of one channel vs another, the 800 pound gorillas in the email marketing and social media spaces are answering this question for us by taking convergence to the consumer.

 

"Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have all announced plans to integrate email and social media for their end users. Google and Microsoft plan to integrate social functionality into Gmail and Outlook respectively… These announcements are significant in that, if all three are successful, the consumer¹s view of email and social media will become highly integrated during the next year or so."

 

And Hersant also emphasises that far from spelling the end of email marketing, the integration should be embraced as a much-needed shot in the arm. "Anyone that engages in a debate over which channel is superior is approaching this from the wrong angle. Not only do both channels complement each other from a marketing perspective, they are significantly more powerful when used together than either channel alone," he says. "As email marketers, it is important to prepare for this shift by developing an integrated marketing strategy for the two channels now. Get ready for your viral marketing programs to become exponentially more powerful."

 

 

So what are the potential implications for customer engagement and email marketing?

 

Al Iverson, director of privacy and deliverability at ExactTarget, believes that for the time being, the social inbox will be the feature that has the biggest impact on how marketers go about their business. "Exactly how a company can be invited through this barrier and allowed to be part of the ‘messages’ inbox experience remains to be seen," he explains. "Is this even a place where it makes sense for your typical one-to-many email messages to live? That also remains to be seen.

 

"I think it makes sense to start thinking about how to integrate what you’re doing into the Facebook experience. Make it easy for subscribers to opt-in to your messaging from your Facebook page. Make it easy for subscribers to be able to change their subscription email address. Make sure you have a social media strategy and a Facebook presence, so that you still have a way to interact with these users who otherwise may not be welcoming your messages to the inbox."

 

Bob Pike, COO of SITEFORUM, also suggests some other issues to consider as email and social media begin to merge. "If the consumer is interacting with email and social media in one platform, marketing messages must be delivered in a way in which allows them to be consumed by social networks or email," he says. "Marketers do run the risk of bombarding the consumer however, so should pick their battles carefully. People already expect marketing messages to be relevant to them, and so marketers have to understand the way in which consumers use both email and social media in order to get the pitch right.

 

"There is a clear danger that marketers will turn their focus onto social media, as the host of all communication; however this won’t necessarily be well received by the consumer. I think there will need to be a clear distinction between when and where marketers send their messages, so as not to overwhelm customers using one platform for all of their communications."

 

Eric Grafstrom, SVP operations for sales and business development at Xobni, meanwhile, is confident that that marketers will adapt quickly to respond to the changes – and that the appropriate tools will soon be developed to address issues related to email and social network integration.

 

"If email social networks become more integrated and intelligent then one can assume the same will happen for delivery of marketing messages," he suggests. "Ad targeting has become very sophisticated over the past several years allowing marketers to target the individual user out of a sea of millions and millions of people. Marketers will demand and companies will deliver more sophisticated methods for targeting the user based on what will net the best result. 

 

"Marketers do not want to make decision on email versus display versus social network – they want to get their message to the right people at the right time and will demand tools accordingly. Marketers will watch closely as the market evolves – keep in mind Facebook just announced this and we have yet to see how users react and Facebook’s platform will evolve as they collect feedback and get input from their users and advertisers."

 

Indeed, the message for now is ‘don’t panic’. Reports of email’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Email will continue to be a useful weapon in the marketer’s arsenal. But there is plenty to bear in mind as email usage begins to adapt.

 

"It’s very important that marketers don’t over-react," concludes Iverson. "Email is still really important to a lot of people, says Facebook. They certainly hope that over time, people will shift a lot of their one-to-one messaging over to this ‘simpler messaging system’. But how fast that will happen, and how broadly that will be accepted, are unknowns that nobody is yet able to answer."