If you are wondering why there is a need to even ask this question, then you are badly lagging behind concerning the current status of email marketing. “It is not what it used to be” opined Willie Crawford, in his piece “The Real Death of Email Marketing”. He stated further on: “I’ve talked to friends from over a year ago, who often confided in me that they sent out emails and got absolutely no response”.
You’d have to ponder if your email list members even got your email, let alone read them.
These days, it has been universally accepted by many that all businesses, both online and the traditional brick and mortar, stands on a unstable footing if its marketing approach is mostly dependent on email marketing.
A lot of the savvy internet marketers concur that this occurrence is caused by email deliverability problems. Now days, emails simply don’t get through as much as they did some years back because of the internet service providers determination opposed to spamming. Crawford opines that “Email is being filtered so heavily today that often less than 20% of a large ezine mailing gets delivered.”
In my opinion, I also believe that email marketing is gradually becoming outdated, so I assent with a lot of what Willie Crawford said in his article. With a lot of sophisticated platforms that are emerging that deliver information with the same, if not more power, than the conventional mass email dissemination, why must we go through the obstacles of emails getting filtered and blocked?
One of the avenues that can be as good and might even be much better than email marketing is the utilization of micro-blogging sites for instance, Twitter. Jason O’Connor describes numerous ways to efficiently use Twitter as an internet marketing tool in his article “Top Ten Ways To Use Twitter For Marketing”.
One of the best uses for microblogging websites like Twitter, according to O’Connor, involve using Twitter “to promote new pieces of content you and your company create to drive traffic to your site,” by tweeting links to your company’s valuable “online articles, blog posts, videos and webinars.” The article also included a technique to put together your business’s Twitter followers by using Twitter’s search function to discover people who may have an interest in the products or services your company sells.
But O’Connor informs us not to manipulate Twitter by just posting links to advertisements for your products. “It’s important that you don’t abuse Twitter for marketing and promoting your products, services and affiliate links,” he wrote. “Most of your tweets ought to be about offering your followers useful and valuable information. Only seldom should you try to make use of Twitter to promote something. “Otherwise, you’ll be perceived as a spammer, and no one wants that tag.”
But there’s a micro-blogging site like Twitter that accepts advertisement with open arms. Wille Crawford (going back to his article) mentioned a website that “is built on a platform that looks and feels a lot like Twitter, except that it’s built for marketers.” The site is called Sokule, (pronounced “so cool”) and it supports its members to market on the site. SoKule puts forward a work around to the email marketing quandary by allowing upgraded members to “direct message ALL of their followers a maximum of once every three days. That means that in a very real way, when you build a following on SoKule, you ARE building a list.”
Twitter is well-known. SoKule is new. Twitter has millions of members. SoKule probably has lesser numbers. Beware of being branded as a spammer with Twitter. Market as much as you want with SoKule. Pick just one or sign up with both. What matters mainly is that your product gets as much awareness as it needs when the time comes for email marketing to disappear gradually.
Follow me on Twitter.com/legalbear See you there. 
Tags: building a list, deliverability, deliverability problems, drive traffic, email list, email marketing, filtered, internet marketers, internet marketing tool, marketing plan, mass email, micro-blogging, online business, search function, Sokule, Twitter, Willie Crawford