Facebook – Email Marketing Killer

Interesting article regarding Facebook’s entrant into the world of email provider. New release called Facebook Messages

The gist of the article:

Facebook (FB) is combining text messaging, instant messaging (IM) and email into one product. FB has already rolled out limited @facebook.com email account to a few selected FB users. Some experts are chiming in that this will change the entire email marketing landscape because retailers will not be able to bombard @facebook users. The only emails getting through will be the ones that are connected to FB user.

According to the article these are the unique characteristic of the @Facebook is offering:

1. @facebook – limit access to friends and family into one email account bucket while non-friends will be siphoned into another bucket (folder)
2. All chats, emails and post will be documented and strung together – so that users will have the history of all conversations readily available.
3. The bcc and cc will not be part of their features and no more subject lines either.

Furthermore, the article points out that the “Like” button will not only be important for getting your brand notice, but it will be crucial to get as much “like votes”. This may be the only way for marketers to getting their marketing message into the user primary  folder, in other words into their friends and family folder.

Finally, the last bit is about the importance of marketing messages usability for smart phones to ensure that users will actually be able, or enticed, to read marketing emails using their phones.

My take:

It will definitely be interesting to see how this feature will be used by the FB user base. I can see the appeal of having one platform to manage all your personal conversation. I use IM alot, I won’t have to log into my IM or Messager account any longer. I won’t have to text on my phone, then email separately, and then go back to my text to see the history of the conversation. So, definitely this feature is very appealing. Why haven’t the other guys thought of that?

On the other hand, as a marketer, I am going have to get a lot more creative. I wonder if brands that have FB presence will be able to access their fan base easily without being bucketed, or is the main point that fans are bucketed into another folder? If that is the case, engaging conversation is all the more crucial. With so much distraction out there, it will be difficult to hold people’s attention for too long unless its interesting.

Have you read this article? If so, please share your opinion with us on this new Facebook release. Are you loving it because you can stop using your @gmail and @yahoo and other @email accounts? OR are you hating it because your job just got harder?

By: Shirley Tan