Even while social is getting all of the love, and there are endless discussions, newsletters, e-books, blog posts, and consultants that revolve around maximizing your social engagement impact on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, email manages to remain more relevant than ever. As an email marketer, don’t be disheartened: never lose sight of the value of email.
Just remember: it’s actually because of social media that email marketing holds its power. While the purpose of social media is to engage and connect through conversation, email marketing takes it one step further: to conversion. A person’s email inbox is infinitely more personal than any social site they may be frequenting, and smart email marketers who follow email marketing best practices know this.
Even after discounting the volume of email messages that are made up by spam, email is used far more than Facebook and Twitter combined. How much more? Daily activity for Facebook is pegged at 60 million updates. Twitter sees about 140 million tweets per day. Email? 188 billion messages. Yes, that’s right: billion.
Smart email marketers can tap just a few of those billions of email messages as the most direct way to a sale. Email marketing best practices starts with good content, followed by an opportunity for conversation.
To see at a glance how valuable email is, check out this great infographic. Because nothing screams “email marketing is valuable!” better than this visual.
Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/09/the-value-of-email-infographic.php