Social media chasing email as marketers’ favourite channel

Whilst email is still the most popular marketing channel, social media is growing as marketers' preferred tool to engage customers. 

Message Systems surveyed more than 100 email and marketing professionals worldwide and found despite 97% of respondents leveraging email for marketing campaigns, 70% leverage social networks for marketing.

However, although social media and mobile are changing customer communications, 63% of marketers claimed email still outperforms social media when it comes to ROI. 

Meanwhile, the survey showed that marketers are increasingly using social media to engage customers in a two-way dialogue as well as leveraging SMS for engagement.

George Schlossnagle, CEO of Message Systems, said: “Despite recent reports that the return on investment with email marketing has been declining over the past few years, our survey found that email is thriving, and driving more revenue and conversions than any other channel.

“In fact, nearly 70% of our customers reported that their email marketing returns have actually trended upwards in the past five years. Additionally, the survey findings that engagement efforts are often held back by difficulties around data sourcing and technological shortcomings fall completely in line with our market position that a single unified platform for integrating customer data and customer communications makes the most sense for today's customer-centric organisations.”