Will Social Media End Email Marketing?

I'm sure you've noticed the impact social media is having on our business lives?   

Chatting, connecting with potential clients, allowing your prospective clients to voice their opinion on topics that are important to them and networking with past colleagues, these sound more like good networking skills and customer service programs.  But when you add tweeting, linking, connecting from services called LinkedIn, Blogging and Twitter and we've got game changers.

Your business communitity when built on Social Media is instant, loud and wide.  Instant: as soon as you send your news or message your community will read it on twitter or email.  Loud:  Your community can like/dislike, comment, converse and share the news.  Wide:  News travels quickly on the net!. 

Can a one-dimensional, static email newsletter compete with all of this? 

Email Trends
Just about everybody we know is using email.  In fact,  the following chart from NielsonWire reveals that email usage is up.

                                                                     Nielson News

Content Design and Approach Per Medium
The one thing we do have to remember is that each medium requires a different content approach and writing style.  This suggests that a style of writing for a blog post will be different than a email newsletter.

Privacy IssuesProbably because of privacy issues, trade marks, intense competition and other business concerns, email marketing will still be a viable promotional and communcation medium.

Segmentation / Focused Message and Specials
When done right, the software used for email marketing offers the abilty to segment your database based on different motivational triggers, such as specials, services bought, location and other qualifiers.  Once done,
your email marketing campaigns are powerful sales tools.  I don't think any social media forum can do this for you.  When you send a message it is sent to your entire community.

Email Marketing Trends
However, recent reports have shown a 3% decline on the usage of email marketing. Could Social Media Marketing be the cause of this decline and could we see more of it? It seems that I have more questions than anwers at this time because I could not find any email marketing stats connecting to social media.

If anyone has any information on this topic, please let me know.  And, in the meantime,

Happy Marketing!