How Applicable Are Email Marketing Approaches At This Time?

If you are wondering why there is a need to even ask this question, then you are gravely bringing up the rear concerning the some of the problems email marketers have been experiencing.  “It is not what it used to be” opined Willie Crawford, in his article “The Real Death of Email Marketing”. He stated  continuing on: “I’ve talked to friends from over a year ago, who often confided in me that they sent out emails and got absolutely no response”.

You’d have to consider if your email list members did get your email, let alone read them.

These days, it has been usually accepted by many that a business–and not only the online business— stands on a unstable  foundation if its marketing strategy is primarily grounded on email marketing.

A lot of the expert internet marketers believe that this occurrence is the result of email deliverability hitches.  Now days, emails just don’t get delivered as much as they did some years back because of the internet service providers campaign  against spamming. Crawford opines that “Email is being filtered so heavily today that often less than 20% of a large ezine mailing gets delivered.”

Personally, I also believe that email marketing is little by little becoming irrelevant, so I accede with a lot of what Willie Crawford said in his article. With a lot of sophisticated platforms that are emerging that provide information with the same, if not more power, than the customary mass email delivery, why must we go through the obstacles of emails getting filtered and blocked?

One of the platforms that can be as advantageous and perhaps even be a lot better than email marketing is  the use of micro-blogging sites for instance, Twitter. Jason O’Connor illustrates  a number of approaches to effectively use Twitter as an internet marketing tool in his article “Top Ten Ways To Use Twitter For Marketing”.

O’Connor sees one of the best uses for microblogging websites like Twitter is to use sites similar toTwitter “to promote new pieces of content you and your company create to drive traffic to your site,” by tweeting links to your company’s valuable “online articles, blog posts, videos and webinars.” The article also integrated a way to build your organization’s Twitter followers by making use of Twitter’s search function to discover Twitter users who have expressed an interest in the products your company sells.

But O’Connor warns us not to abuse Twitter by just posting links to sales pitches for your products. “It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services and affiliate links,” he wrote. “Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only seldom should you try to make use of Twitter to promote something. “Otherwise, you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.”

But there’s a platform like Twitter that accepts promotion with open arms. Wille Crawford (going back to his article) talked about a website that “is built on a platform that looks and feels a lot like Twitter, except that it’s built for marketers.” The site’s name is Sokule, (pronounced “so cool”) and it promotes its members to advertise on the site. SoKule offers a way out to the email marketing dilemma by allowing upgraded members to “direct message ALL of their followers a maximum of once every three days. That means that in a very real way, when you build a following on SoKule, you ARE building a list.”

Twitter is well-known. SoKule is new. Twitter has millions of members. SoKule probably has lesser numbers. Beware of being branded as a spammer with Twitter. Market all you want with SoKule. Pick just one or sign up with both. What matters as a rule is that your product gets as much awareness as it can when the time comes for email marketing to diminish.

Follow me on Twitter.com/legalbear See you there.