Tried and true e-mail marketing is alive and thriving despite the deafening buzz generated by social media marketing.
TORONTO – Marketing on social networking sites might be making waves in the media, but for some Canadian businesses traditional e-mail marketing still brings home the bacon. The simplicity and economy of e-mail marketing campaigns are their biggest strengths, these firms say.
One business that successfully uses such campaigns to reach out to a globally dispersed audience is Espial Group, an Ottawa-based provider of Internet Protocol TV middleware and applications.
The company has more than 100 employees in Canada and counts Rogers Communications, Motorola and Nokia as partner-clients. But it also sells extensively to businesses in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and South America.
“We’ve done the research and find social media marketingis really not ideal for business-to-business (B2B) operations such as ours,” said Kirk Edwardson, marketing director at Espial.
He said Facebook-type sites are mostly geared towards consumer markets and frequented by a younger demographic. “We focus our campaigns mostly on decision makers who are older.”
A U.S.-based online marketing specialist agrees with Edwardson’s views.
Compared with direct marketing efforts – snail mail, e-mail, and so on, where an offer is created based on what the company wants to sell, social marketing initiatives focus on involving communities with creating the offer as well as promoting it, says Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketingin Minneapolis in his blog.
While many marketing firms, including TopRank, are moving towards social marketing, Odden says e-mail methods still hold some advantages:
“It’s a straightforward marketing campaign based on developing an offer, defining a target audience, and creating a series of messages intended to communicate the offer and convert.”
Source : exchangemagazine.com
