Email is social and is here to stay

by Tink Taylor

The above video is a portion of a talk given by Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs and author of "The Facebook Era", who was speaking at a recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco

Shih asserts that email is being taken over by social technologies (she mainly focuses on Facebook and the iPhone), especially amongst younger generations.

There is nothing particular revolutionary or groundbreaking here, the growth of Facebook and other social networks is hardly news and I think most marketers agree that social media marketing is becoming important.

Her comments on email and its demise are, again, not anything we haven’t heard before. But, I think Shih’s reasons for its demise are interesting, however this does raise some points for discussion:

Email is social

In many ways, email is the original social technology. Email has always allowed groups of people to communicate and for users to share content with their friends or colleagues.

Extending this one-to-one or one-to-many concept from email into other social media channels isn’t difficult, and in fact email has a number of big benefits that elevate its position

Email isn’t going anywhere

Email has big advantages and these are unlikely to diminish. The main one is its ubiquity. Email is a tried and tested platform; the vast majority of us have an email account (probably more than one) and use it frequently. This is in stark contrast to social networks. Whilst increasing numbers of people are participating on social networks, there isn’t one centralised platform – messages need to be distributed across different networks to reach as many people as possible.

Email, by contrast is an open protocol, meaning that it can be used by different software or platforms. If anything, open technologies like Google Wave will pose a bigger threat to email than social networks [you can read my thoughts on this here…].

So, if we come back to the issue of distribution of content across dispersed networks, Email still has a big part to play. Whilst brands can do some of this initial distribution themselves (using Twitter profiles or Facebook fan pages) it is far more effective if it comes from the consumer (or prosumer)…

Email + social media = powerful marketing

This nicely brings us onto integration. If email remains the best way to get a message out to an audience because of its ubiquity, including social media bookmarking links within these messages and encouraging recipients to tweet or share the content on Facebook or Twitter et. al. is a great way to build up distributed content on social media channels.

And consumers are more likely to share email addresses with brands than information about social media. A recent study from Pontiflex found that only 12% of online adults said they’d be willing to provide social media information (like a Twitter handle or Facebook name) to marketers online, while 96% of those surveyed had provided their email to brands to receive special promotions or more information.

This is not a ‘them and us’ discussion, but we need to be aware of when, where and how consumers like to use the different communication methods at their disposal. Marketers that are really excelling in this exciting new digital world are those that are able to link up different marketing tactics and strategies across all marketing channels.

Email delivery to BTINternet.com addresses affected on November 12th

By Tom Corbett

Anyone who sent email campaigns to BTInternet.com addresses between about 09:00 and 15:30 on Wednesday Nov 12, ran a risk of their emails not being delivered.

Please don't blame our client support guys - this was completely out of dotMailer's hands. The problem was a BT related issue, due as far as we can tell to their difficulties with some BT Yahoo mail servers.

For more detail please see the BT help page which hints at the problem:

12 November 2009
09:31 AM
Consumer email issue
We are aware of a temporary problem with emails which may be causing some customers problem with sending/receiving emails via their web client. We're sorry if you've been affected. Our engineers are now working to fix the problem, and we expect to have the service back to normal as soon as possible.

BT marked the issue as resolved around 11am, but the changes they made took a while to propagate across the net.

If you're in doubt about your sends to BTInternet.com addresses on the 12th then check your soft bounce reports for 'DNS failure' reason codes. If necessary you can save these as an address book and resend your campaign to them.

dotMailer and dotDigital group team winners at the 2009 National Business Awards

By Cliff Guy

At 1.30 this morning our MD sent me a text saying "We won".

I knew exactly what he meant.

Last night the awards ceremony for the National Business Awards 2009 was held at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London, where dotMailer (part of the dotDogital Group) were nominated in the 'Best Growth Strategy' category.

And I'm very pleased to say our MD was there to collect the award, when we were announced as the winners.

It was by all accounts a business-star studded event, headed up by the Chancellor Alistair Darling taking to the stage.

The award we were presented with went to the organisation who 'demonstrated an organic growth strategy that has achieved outstanding levels of sales and market share improvement'.

The category was fiercely contended and we had to jump through several major hoops just to get to the short list, so we're all a bit chuffed to have won.

In many ways this award goes out to all our dotMailer email marketing clients and users, along with our website design, ecommerce and SEO clients. It's the trust and belief that you all show in our services and your willingness to recommend us to others that's helped to drive our growth. So here's to you!

I think it's also a tribute to our understanding of how to use email and digital marketing to really drive growth - because our sales and marketing model is pure digital. That's the knowledge we can share with you, to help your business be a part of the success story too.

Now, how's that Champagne chilling?