Is Twitter Marketing Replacing Email Marketing? Will Email Marketing Disappear?

Why Is Email Marketing Still Used

There are three reasons why companies, in particular smaller ones, still use email marketing:

• 1Everyone's used to it - Email marketing has been used for many years now and in its good days has been effective. It's ingrained in companies' mentality. Email itself has proven more resilient than many would have expected.
• 2Subscriber's list - Any company that has been running an email marketing campaign for a few years should have a long list of subscribers. It's not easy to just ditch this list, disregarding the thousands of entries on the list.
• 3Some still think it fresh - Not all companies have teams of IT experts to point out that there are newer alternatives to email marketing.

Benefits of Email Marketing

• 1Notifications - Email can still serve as an excellent notifier for new product releases or various policy changes that affect consumers one way or another. Banks for example can send email notifications whenever they change the interest rate on a credit card. Email notifications are straightforward and easy to receive and follow.
• 2Newsletters for special user groups - Email can be used to send newsletters with new products or services only to a specific group of subscribers, provided that you enable your customers to subscribe to different newsletters. Maintaining multiple newsletters obviously requires more work.
• 3Specific marketing - If you want to target only one customer, email marketing is probably superior to other marketing tools. It is private, and feels truly like a personal electronic business letter. Twitter is a viral marketing tool and cannot be used as effectively for marketing to just one customer.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

There are plenty. Here's a summary.

• 1Spam - There are few online technologies that have been so abused as the email. The amount of spam one gets in his inbox is truly overwhelming, despite all spam protection.
• 2Worthless content - A lot of the content featured in newsletters is simply uninteresting. It's not easy to come up with consistently good newsletter content for your subscribers.
• 3Where's the Unsubscribe link? - Few newsletters feature a clearly visible unsubscribe link - most hide it at the very bottom of the email behind a font so small that's barely legible. To make matters worse, some newsletters feature no unsubscribe link at all.

Benefits of Twitter Marketing

• 1Easy to use and cost-free - One of the reasons why Twitter is so popular is that it's so fun to use. This makes it less tedious for those running a marketing campaign.
• 2Viral - Ideal for mass marketing as it helps you spread word about whatever you're promoting to a lot of people quickly. Email is comparatively slower - it takes at least a few days before word reaches a lot of people. With Twitter it is only a matter of hours at most.
• 3Can be done on the go - You use Twitter marketing straight from you mobile device, wherever you are. This is not the case with email, where you have to come up with a newsletter design first.
• 4Cool - Twitter is one of the hottest tools on the Web, and using it makes your company look tech savvy. What's more, many people are obsessed with Twitter, and the only way to get to them is by using it yourself.

Disadvantages of Twitter Marketing

• 1Messages are limited to 140 characters - This brevity may make your marketing look too plain to be persuasive. Sometimes fewer words are preferable, but not when you want to describe a product or service.
• 2Lack of personalization for messages - With Twitter you send a text and possibly a link. With email you can include images and animations. A good picture is often what entices a customer to buy a product.
• 3Messages cannot be as targeted as when you use email - All your followers get the same message and that's that. You don't have multiple mailing lists as you have when using email marketing.