It is an interesting time for email marketing right now. Though it is still a quite effective medium for marketers, there are many challenges to deal with. This was the subject of a session moderated by David Daniels of Shop.org summit in Las Vegas this week.
What do you see as the biggest challenges for email marketing campaigns? 
Email portability adoption is increasing. For example, just this week Google launched Facebook alone just surpassed the 300 million-user milestone a couple weeks ago. That's close to the same amount of people that make up the entire population of the United States, to put that into perspective.
Many companies are utilizing social media and integrating it into their email marketing campaigns. There's no reason why you shouldn't be doing the same. Incorporate Facebook pages, Twitter, and/or MySpace accounts into campaigns. You can further engage with customers, and in turn keep interest in your emails going.
The key is to stay relevant to users. According to Daniels, "relevance empowered" mailings deliver more top and bottom line improvement than broadcast. He gave a few recommendations for implementation:
- For one, become an advocate for change, and address your organization's readiness to embrace it.
- Secondly, understand the value of subscribers, and focus on their behaviors.
- He says to make it easy for consumers to share info with a lot of people quickly, but to learn about specific social behaviors of customers before creating your social strategy.
- And last, but not least, to "test, test, test."
I'll add a couple of my own cents, and suggest that once your email campaign is integrated into social media, it becomes fair game for going viral and for being found in real-time searches. Essentially, your campaign can be taken from the inboxes of subscribers and expanded out onto the real-time web.
Email marketers shouldn't fear social media. They should embrace it. Of course, campaigns will need to be compelling enough to get people to want to share them.
Murdok reporter Abby Johnson contributed to this article from Shop.org in Las Vegas.
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