Email marketing campaigns were once a cornerstone in any good ecommerce marketing strategy, but with the advent of Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, and others, where does email marketing land? Is it still relevant in a social web?

The answer is rather shocking actually. To start with, email still far outweighs social media in the number of users: Twitter’s gathered 175 tweeters, Facebook now exceeds 600 million users, but email has around 1.88 billion users.  By extension, the chance of a potential customer having an email address is still much higher than the chance that the consumer will have a Facebook profile.  

Additionally, email goes directly to a location where consumers are used to receiving messages and can be formatted for superior presentation with html.  Average open rates for email still hover between 10% and 20%, depending on the study, which may seem low but isn’t bad comparatively.  With Facebook its difficult to determine whether or not someone will view your post. If a FB user has 250 friends that each make one post per day, depending on how frequently that user checks their status page, they may or may not scroll through the most recent posts to see your business plug.  Another statistic that stands out in favor of continuing email campaigns is the fact that 58% of internet users check their email first thing when going online versus 14% for social media.

In short, email should still be included in your marketing toolbox. So, in the spirit of good email campaigns, here’s 5 tips of get started.

Gather your email addresses  You can send email campaigns through your existing customer list or pay for a targeted list through a listing service.  Buying a list can be well worth the money, depending on the price and how close to your target buyer they can come, but an overpriced less may not justify the predicted revenue from the campaign, so tread carefully!

Set a specific campaign goal – Email campaigns should be focused and should have a clear conversion goal, such as getting the reader to sign up for a product trial, purchasing an add-on product, etc.

Identify you audience – Think carefully about the target audience that will be receiving the email and be sure to tailor the appearance and content of the email to be most acutely targeted demographic.

Track results – Use an analytics program like Google Analytics to track the effectiveness the of the campaign and gain insight into how to improve future mailings. You can set campaign tags (additional information you apply to links) so that once a link in the email is clicked the tag information is passed to analytics.

Time Email With Other Media/Promotions – Again, email campaigns should have a focused goal and purpose. One great way to hone in a campaign’s intention is to relate it to recent sales, promotions, or product releases.