This is a guest post by Murray Newlands from MurrayNewlands.com, an email marketing blog.
Email marketing has been one of the phenomenons of affiliate marketing for the last 10 years on both sides of the Atlantic. Postal direct marketing has been generally superseded by email marketing as a tool of choice for many marketers. As products and services have become commoditized, marketing has become one of the differentiators and email marketing has provided a cheap method of mass communication with immediate and tangible results.
You send an email and see the results within hours. In a world where businesses want to know defined and measurable results, email marketing has had few competitors in many sectors.
Shawn Collins recent survey revealed that 51% of affiliates collect email lists, which shows that email marketing is still on an upwards trend. Nelsen published a report this week that said social media power users also consumed large volumes of email lists.
Email marketing solution providers have not been slow on the uptake with these, enabling users to post them directly to Facebook and other social networks. This has produced some spectacularly positive results for email solution providers. By re-targeting and encouraging those people to post more to their social networks, marketers have generated huge amounts of positive traffic.
OK now here is the question. What will happen when consumers learn the power of this and start posting about brands that email them too much? Watch for the social media tidal wave brand flashback.
Thoughts?
{ 1 trackback }
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post, Murray. The relationship between email marketing and social media has been greatly enhanced by the Share button, and it seems to have all but replaced forward to a friend. I sometimes wonder if people will realize they are doing free viral marketing for the emailers. In the future, does every subscriber want to become an automatic affiliate? Or will the consumer be just as hasty to say something negative about a brand? Hmm…
Eric thank you for providing me the opportunity to guest post
Murray´s last blog ..FTC Bloggers rules FTCWTF
“In the future, does every subscriber want to become an automatic affiliate” then they would all have to follow FTC guidelines LOL. No probably better it it is seen as a non rewarded conversation.
Murray´s last blog ..Test Post 3
In a world where businesses want to know defined and measurable results, email marketing has had few competitors in many sectors.