The Differences Between Email Marketing and Social Networking

Email marketing is a type of advertising and sales promotion on the internet that specifically uses the medium of the internet as opposed to banner ads and other promotional material on the internet. Unlike these more familiar modes of advertising, this form of marketing can be more personal and enjoy the benefits of a captive, non-distracted audience. Social networking, on the other hand, has actually nothing to do with marketing at all. It is one of the havens of the internet, so far, that does not espouse or elicit any kind of business or transactions. Fundamentally, social networking is just a website that is an online club of people where people can catch up with their old, known friends and through the medium of common interest microsites can even make new friends. So basically, it is all about making friends.

There is a possible symbiotic relationship that can be derived here: social networking has a lot of users while marketing through email needs users. Therefore, if not symbiotic, a harmless parasitic relationship might develop in which an online marketer will leverage his or her own presence on a social networking site to get users to sign up for email marketing alerts and newsletters. This is dicey purely because the powers that be in social networking forums disallow any kind of business propositions between members. In fact, since most social networking sites have their own messaging system, they also have spam filters – ones that will blacklist a member from ever participating again if unsolicited mail is sent. So we can see that the difference between the two lies in the fact that one is a venture with purely business and revenue-based objectives in mind while the other is a pure social interaction. There are, of course, ways of making this work from a business perspective but this requires a high degree of brand recall as well as a high degree of marketing and advertising expertise.

The practice of marketing through email and social networking also lies in the aspect of choice. Social networking is all about choice: the choice to expand a network, the choice to say what you want to say, and the choice to be visible or invisible. Marketing through email, in a sense can be more intrusive, and once you sign-up for a email update, you will be sent updates till the day you unsubscribe; sometimes, you don’t even have to subscribe to get mail – a practice called spamming.

The way that email marketing and social networking should come together is by understanding and espousing trust. An email marketer can make social networking useful by creating microsites and fan pages, advertising them through the banner ads and click-of-mouse publicity of the website, and then getting more users to sign up as a natural progression. This is the age where the aggression of email marketers has to be toned down. This is the age when the email marketer will have to wait for the user to come to him or her. All promotional and user-acquisitions must now be based on this principle.

Jamie Colbs is a html email newsletter templates best practices activist advocate for Benchmark Email , a leading Web and permission-based email marketing service.

Author Links
Business URL: http://www.benchmarkemail.com/email-marketing/html-email-templates

Business/Social Networking Links
Twitter URL: http://twitter.com/benchmarkemail

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Tagged with: business propositions • networking forums • social networking site • social networking sites • unsolicited mail

Filed under: Internet Marketing

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