With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, does email marketing matter anymore?

Does the fact that you can create a Fan Page, a group for your company, cafe or event, especially on social media sites like Facebook – helping to make email marketing irrelevant?
How email marketing typically works
The success of email marketing is based on permission, you can ask and receive permission from people who visit your website, store or event to give you their names and email addresses, so you can keep in contact with them. With them saying yes and signing up via an email capture form on your site or writing in a book, you now have permission to keep them informed about sales, new product/services and upcoming events. A relationship has been formed. You are expecting to send them information, they are expecting to hear from you. To email them, you may choose to use services such as mailbuild.com which has a charge however minimal or you can use local email marketing providers like one in Jamaica, Jamaicalifestyle.com and they charge US$100 to push your message to their mailing list. There are many others who just use their free email from yahoo or gmail, load up their tens, or hundreds of email addresses and click send.Hey it’s free, and there isn’t a need to know if the email bounced or is still valid, was opened, clicked or passed along-features a paid service like mailbuild.com gives. BUT.

And now there is Facebook,Twitter
With the advent of social networking sites and facilities like Facebook and Twitter, this enables you to build a list of interested fans, followers and group members. Here again they have decided to come a fan, to follow you, to become a member of your group. Again a relationship has been formed. At this time Facebook and Twitter is free to send messages to your Fans, to group members and to followers. They have gone further and are now offering you the same features as some email marketing services providers do-information on who your fans, group members and followers are via e.g. Facebook’s insight’s feature which culls demographic and geolocation data. Very valuable.

So given where we are coming from – email lists and email marketing service providers to now the social web and it’s features of building fans and followers, is email marketing on a slippery slop to becoming irrelevant?

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