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One sure indicator of the health of any business is the return on investment or ROI. All companies base their business strategies so as to achieve a higher amount of ROI. For companies engaged in some form of e-marketing, use of an effective communication tool is imperative to broaden their consumer base and highlight the brand image. Till recently the choice of such medium has been the company website and the email. Of these two, the latter has proved to be more potent. Lately, business houses have been provided with another option to reach the customers – the social networks. Social channels have come up in a big way with sizable following and the more popular among them even posing as some sort of a threat to companies like Google. So it was natural for e-marketers to utilize this form of communication with the hope that it will prove to be equally, if not more, than email or company website. Unfortunately statistics tells us otherwise.

A recent report is definitely going to prove worrisome to the major email providers in United States, Canada, and Europe including U.K. The report points out that a significant percentage, a whopping 19.9% – of business emails permissioned by users never reach their inboxes. Return Path, the company releasing the report informs that the data is pertinent for emails sent during July-December 2009 in the United States and Canada.

Gmail Priority Inbox launched by Google sometime back has turned out to be quite a popular feature with GMail users. Spam filtering already has been a standard feature of GMail but the newly featuring Priority Inbox is supposed to discriminate between important or must-be-read information and non-informative or useless ones. This is a great help for the GMail users who otherwise have to wade through each mail incurring a lot of effort, time and frustration.

Hotmail users will be rejoicing when the upgraded version of their favorite email service. Email has proved itself to be the most-used, secure and fast communications tool for all and also as a great marketing medium, borne out by the number of email marketing companies. But despite its overwhelming success there are a lot to improve upon as well as quite a few wish lists in the form of new features. Microsoft with the Active Views platform incorporated in the upgraded Hotmail version has offered a few solutions to them.

One ongoing topic of contention that is doing the rounds is the perceived threat of social media dislodging email as the primary mode of communication. Some of us are forecasting that email is on the way out and would be extinct in the foreseeable future. One unassailable fact in favor of such people is the rate at which social media is growing and the vast following that it has attracted. Though social media is comparatively a new kid on the block it has emerged a serious contender to companies like Google. But there are several valid reasons why email is not going to be replaced by it. Here are a few of them.

A report from Econsultancy based on a survey of more than 1400 American consumers reveals that e-commerce marketing relies more on email for its functioning than the social networks. This is borne by the fact that about 37% of the surveyed people do not subscribe to any social networking site.

E-mail is one of the best things that has happened since the start of the internet to individuals and businesses alike. It has emerged as a premium means of communicating information – personal, corporate and marketing. But only if it contains relevant and useful information to the person receiving it. Unfortunately it is not happening like that.

Everybody expected Facebook to come out with an announcement about a break-through in email service, but AOL has beaten them with one of their own. The new version of AOL Mail that the company is going to launch is being referred to as ‘Project Phoenix’. According to Brad Garlinghouse, President of AOL’s Consumer Applications Group, email has proved itself to be the most-used and proven way of communication medium. AOL being the pioneer in online services, they are in a position to recast email with a number of innovative features.

Social media has emerged as a medium through which one can interact with a large number of people from every part of the world and from all walks of life. Marketers have been astute enough to realize this and many have taken advantage by reaching people belonging to various social sites to increase their brand awareness. Needless to say, many companies have benefited from this but is this the best way to advertise your product in internet marketing? It does not seem so because it is still a long way behind Email marketing.

Recent reports suggest that Facebook is driving greater traffic to well-known sites than Google. The number of unique visitors accessing Facebook is still significantly less than Google but it is on an upward trend. Number of unique visitors to Facebook increased from around 110 million in November 2009 to almost 140 million in November 2010 – a hefty 25% upswing. Surely with such a steep growth Facebook is likely to emerge as a serious competitor to Google maybe not as a search engine but in terms of advertising. Not that the advertisers will shy away from Google in favour of Facebook but the latter would definitely grab a sizable chunk of e marketing. Even regarding search advertising, Facebook is not likely to lag behind. Because most of the traffic in Facebook originates in the form of links posted by members in ‘Notes’ and ‘Photos’, the next logical step will naturally be to transform these areas as paid search. Once this happens, Microsoft holding a share in this social net may look at it as an way of better return on it s investment.