By Chris Lee

This year’s Ad:Tech London expo for digital marketers provided another opportunity for the industry to get together to learn about best practice in Internet marketing. Among many of the topics up for discussion was email marketing in the age of social media.

According to Internet marketing guide Econsultancy, more than half of organisations are using email marketing as a tool to win new business, with the majority (75 per cent) happy with the return on investment it provides. The advent of social media presents new challenges to companies looking to integrate their marketing strategies, especially when it comes to email marketing.

Best practice

NMK was in attendance at a seminar on email marketing run by digital marketing trainers the IDM on the conference’s opening day. Due to the competitive nature of advertising, companies have to be ever more creative in their email marketing, according to Abigail Codd, a trainer at the IDM.

“[Email marketing] needs to be short, engaging and exciting,” she told delegates, which should include interactive content such as images, video and podcasts.

“A lot of people think you can’t see images in B2B (business-to-business) email marketing because it may be blocked, but this isn’t true,” Codd added. “You need intelligent design for all email clients, such as Lotus Notes and Outlook.”

Analyst group Gartner estimates that by 2013 mobiles will have overtaken PCs as the main Web access tool, a fact which email marketers need to address, making sure their content can be read by iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smart phones.

Going social

“A lot of people have asked if social media is the end of [email marketing], but social media users are also big users,” Codd said.

The key is to get social media working alongside social channels, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, Codd advised, and content should be tailored for each channel and integrated within wider marketing objectives. She cited one accounting firm which had a dedicated team internally committed to creating content, managing the company’s online reputation, monitoring conversations online. Marketers should always think about how they manage their own email accounts when embarking on campaigns, Codd added.

“Email is not a cheap channel, it’s part of many channels and it’s here for a while yet,” she concluded. “It’s about making sure the right people get the right email through the channel they prefer. It’s about putting the customer in control, not you [the marketer]. It’s about relationship management.”

For more on email marketing read the Twelve Rules of Christmas Email Marketing.