Email Strategy Roundtable: Does Social Media Mean The Death of Email?

We’re hearing this a lot lately: email is dead, social is king. But what is really driving that, and can we trust the numbers that these prophets are pointing to? Ezra Fischer of ReturnPath just wrote a great post that dissects a recent Chart of the Day from Silicon Valley Insider that – at first glance – shows social media use overtaking email use. Check out his reaction and provocative questions here, and our two cents:

Kimberly

Kudos to Ezra for pointing out how misleading both of these charts can be when it comes to the potential “death of email.” I have heard this statement over and over for quite some time now and ultimately don’t understand why one must conquer the other – in many ways this debate is futile and quite immature. Email marketing can co-exist with any marketing channel – more importantly email can help leverage social media and vice versa. Just as Ezra points out, consumers aren’t choosing one medium over the other; they are simply utilizing more mediums than ever before.

Kelly

Social's killing email; Email is dead - oh no! What does this all mean?! But seriously, here's the thing (well, two things): 1) Social relies on email and 2) People SHOULDN'T be spending more time on email than social networks. Let me expand upon both. When you get a new friend request on Facebook or a new follower on Twitter or a request to connect on LinkedIn and so on, how are you notified? Through email, right? For the foreseeable future I don't see this changing, so email, for now, is the cornerstone and gateway of social networking. But, I wouldn't expect or really want the typical consumer to spend hours of time with their email. What's important to remember is that email is a means to an end. The goal is to get them on your site to engage and shop, not spend an inordinate amount of time staring at and admiring your email.

I'm also a bit skeptical of the larger number of social users to email for the reasons Ezra mentions in the post. The adoption of email is so widespread at this point I think we'd be hard-pressed to find a consumer in the developed world that doesn't have an email address. Reason being, for any type of online interaction, email addresses are often what gain you access to content, goods and other users. I believe Ezra's theory that the statistics in the study are counting each user of each site, not each individual person that is a social network user.

However, I do think email can adopt some of the features of social networks by interacting and engaging with subscribers. I think social networking has changed the way marketers need to operate. It's changed from a one-to-many, batch and blast, talking AT people to a one-to-one, personalized and engaging, talking WITH people model thanks, in large part, to social media.

Julie

I’m in agreement here, and want to reiterate that it makes total sense that the amount of time spent on social media should be more than email, especially with the rise in popularity of timesucking games like Farmville, Fishville, Café World, Mafia Wars and countless others. On top of that, the email notifications come fast and furious when anyone recommends something, friends you, makes a comment, invites you to an event or group, tags you in a photo, etc., etc. which constantly drives users out of email and into social media.

Additionally, I would question how they’re measuring time spent – is it how long you are logged in to your email, or how much time you spend writing and reading email? For example, I have three email accounts open nearly 8 hours a day if not more – my work account, a dummy account I use for watching email marketing that comes through and my personal account to keep an eye out for urgent messages (and also to collect consumer email marketing intel). That’s 24+ hours a day you could technically say I spend on email, though the time spent actually interacting with it is much less, as it doesn’t take long to hit delete, forward or read and respond to a message. Likewise, a lot of people stay logged into Facebook or Twitter for extended periods of time, but the time spent actually interacting with the site is way less.

But the bottom line is, if people didn’t check their email, they probably wouldn’t spend as much time on social networking sites. One can’t kill the other – it must be a symbiotic relationship.

Do you agree or disagree, or do you read the numbers differently? Share your thoughts below!

Julie Waite
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto