Three Signs Email Marketing is About to EXPLODE in 2012!

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This article is being written on New Year's Eve 2011.  In past years this is about the time when the "Email is Dead!" bandwagon starts.  They haven't been right in the past and this year they are more wrong than ever!

Email marketing is about to EXPLODE!

Here's why.

The Success of Groupon. 

You can stand on the street corner and yell Social Media as loud as you want, meanwhile companies like Groupon and LivingSocial and about 100 copy cats have been having HUGE success building big lists and making valuable offers to these lists.

What's new about this strategy?  Nothing at all.  Email lists are old news and Discount Coupons are older news.  Combine the two with a geographic emphasis and voila, billion-dollar valuation.

The reason that these business models have worked is that the inbox is still a place where relevant emails are desired!

Now that Groupon has shown the way, others are keen to follow this seemingly simple business model.  All I can say is it's simple...but NOT easy.

Thanks Groupon!

Facebook optin fan pages. 

If you have a fan page on Facebook you're ahead of the curve in your use of the world's biggest social media platform.

If you are using your Facebook fan page to collect email addresses directly into your email list, you are part of a group of marketers that have discovered that 'Likes' are cool, but a big list of engaged followers is even cooler.

I'm seeing more and more companies using Facebook as a list building tool with no end in sight.  The big winners will be those that use all aspects of Facebook (including paid ads) to build their lists.

Thanks Facebook!

Google adwords to collect email optin directly from Adwords ads.

I've seen this only in blog posts from industry experts who have discovered a new Adwords feature.  By digging further, they have discovered this is a beta feature of Adwords and might become generally available.

The feature is this.  You will have the ability to click on a link in a Google ad and have the email address of the visitor added to your newsletter list.  Presto!

Can you imagine the power of a feature like this for companies that are interested in building a list of qualified buyers?

Thanks Google!

Bonus arguement.  Email still top of the heap for marketing ROI.

Every year the Direct Marketing Association publishes a list of the top online marketing channels from the top ROI to the lowest ROI.

Every year email tops that list.

You can't argue with that.