According to a research by JupiterResearch, they found that Social Networking, Test Messaging and Cell Phone Use are Beginning to Impact the Effectiveness of E-mail Marketing.

From the research, they found that in 2007, 51% of e-mail users said e-mail inspired at least one online purchase, and 47% said the same for off-line purchases. However, in 2008, the share of e-mail users fell to 44% for online purchases and 41% for off-line purchases.

I believe that the decrease can be explained by the increasing number of emails coming into our mailbox daily, thanks to spam; the usage of emails for communication is decreasing.

Personally, when i check my emails and I see a massive amount of new mails, I will select all and delete them at one go, leaving only emails from people I know, emails from companies I subscribed to and emails with interesting headers.

I know that this definitely does filter out advertisements from companies which offer me fabulous products, but, it is a pity that they came together with spam.

A few months later, Exacttarget did another research and found that Youth are More Receptive to Email, vs. SocNet, Marketing.

In their research, they segmented their consumers into 6 categories. Among their segments, what was interesting was that almost half the population of young homemakers uses social networks and SMS during the day; however, they prefer direct mail and email marketing as their marketing channel.

Other interesting segments would be the college students and the teens who uses social network more than the other segments, however, they believe that social networks are meant for private communication and would rather marketers use direct mail/ email marketing to market their products.

Personally, some issues that I faced from marketing efforts through social network were that companies which I did not subscribe to, kept sending me irrelevant messages right after they obtained my phone number from who knows where.

Looking at advertisements on Facebook is also very troublesome because whenever I click on the advertisement, they require me to join a particular club before I can look at the advertisement. Going through all the trouble just to take a look at the advertisements was a total turn off and the fact that joining the club not only exposes my information to the advertiser, it also crowds my Facebook profile. These reasons do not justify me joining the club for one advertisement.

In my own opinion, even though there are such contrasting results from the research, a conclusion we can draw would be that consumers only want relevant marketing and getting information from the marketing effort must be easy. Consumers want their privacy yet they are open to receiving marketing information through means they can filter through.

Email or not, if the advertisement is relevant, easy to obtain and understand, it will gain consumer’s attention.