As hot new trends go, social media marketing is looking decidedly lukewarm. Online shoppers pushed Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales to new heights this year, and yet according to a November report from IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, the number of those e-shoppers making purchases after clicking through from social networks dropped by at least 26 percent vs. 2011.
If not social, what stimulated all the incremental November online sales? It's likely much of it was triggered or facilitated by good ol' fashion e-mail. Bloomberg reports that retailers are expected to blast out 19 percent more e-mail messages this year. Undoubtedly that figure conjures images of your choked inbox, but it seems retailers have the right idea. Evidence demonstrates that e-mail as a marketing vehicle is significantly outperforming social media — three-to-one — based on sales per dollars invested, this according to the Direct Marketing Association.
Of course, e-mail has been around much longer than social media and so one might wonder if its dominance in the digital realm is due to years of refinement or if there are inherent problems with social that render it less useful to marketers.
A recent Bloomberg piece describes how many retailers are now using advanced personalization techniques that tailor and target e-mail based on recipients' online shopping habits. For example, when a consumer abandons items in an online shopping cart, the retailer has an excellent indication of the shopper's unfulfilled desires for a follow-up e-mail. Conversely, retailers can take note of what links in an e-mail a shopper clicks and use that data to trigger banner ads that may follow her/him from website to website.
While e-mail appears to be the rare old dog able to learn new tricks, by the curl of its tail, social appears to be an altogether different animal.
In a recent keynote at the MediaPost E-mail Insider Summit, Evan Shumeyko, global director of CRM for OgilvyOne, said that one of e-mail's advantages over social lies in the greater willingness of users to share personal information. While proponents of social extol the "sharing" ingrained in its culture, clearly that tendency doesn't extend comfortably to online marketers as readily as for e-mail communication.
It seems logical that Facebook users, for example, are there to keep up with what friends are doing and find the efforts of marketers to be intrusive. But thinking back to the first half decade when e-mail usage was adopted by the masses, it too was a more personal form of communication. Over the decades, as legit and spam-ish commercial messages invaded our inboxes, we either became more accepting or gave up trying to resist (however you interpret it). Does social need to go through the same maturation process, or is this young pup really an untrainable kitten?