Breaking down the barriers between email and social media marketing

While attending Ad Tech in New York recently, I found myself cringing a number of times when some very smart email marketing professionals kept drawing a line between email and social. I shudder because I think it should be clear that anytime two or more humans interact, it’s social, regardless of the channel or channels they employ.

Every time we make this delineation of email and social we hurt ourselves and do a disservice to our clients and our brands.

If you are using the right email marketing service provider then ESP also stands for Extra Social Perception.

Of course we are all trying to “get our heads around social.” Everyone single person using social media is trying to get their heads around it. The very nature of it being a social channel means that it’s fluid and changing constantly. While the technology behind social media is cool, it’s the way people employ that technology which makes it so relevant and powerful.

If you spend your time looking for the one magic channel which will be the ultimate solution for the marketing needs of your brand or clients, you will be on a never ending quest, tilting at windmills.

We should be focusing on breaking down the obsolete traditional barriers which have been established by media such as print and broadcast rather than trying to reestablish them. Those lines may have been well drawn by necessity in the past, but let’s not etch them again simply because something appears at first to be outside our comfort zone or that of our clients.

The people we all want to reach don’t make the same distinctions marketers may be prone to make about social and email. They move between channels with the intuitive ease of a monkey swinging from vine to vine. It’s important for marketers to view social and email this way too and not make delineations which are really not apparent to the people we are trying to reach and confusing too many of the clients we are trying to serve.

All these social channels have their own strengths and are even stronger when they are combined strategically. Email was the first social channel, driven by the same force which continues to power the web, communities. Brands want to reach out to those communities and smart email marketing service providers facilitate this without stressing about where those interactions take place.

Thanks to Jim Ducharme for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Jim Ducharme is the Community Manager with GetResponse, one of the worlds leading email service providers with clients of all types and sizes around the world. Jim’s role is to reach out to people and communities and help answer their questions and help them enhance their email marketing ROI. He's a veteran broadcaster and editor, having launched such brands as PC World Canada and The eMail Guide as editor. He also has a background in technical support and has built and managed online community networks with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. His traditional and new media experience gives him unique perspective and insight regarding integrated email and multi-channel marketing. Jim loves to demystify complex ideas and terms, putting them into context for busy marketing professionals. You can follow Jim on Twitter @hugeheadca.