The Facebook Outage: How email marketing is still relevant

On October 4th, 2021, Facebook experienced its second-largest outage to date. While other outages have been fixed relatively quickly, this one lasted for about six hours. For most companies and marketers alike, the outage was a bizarre moment, but as time progressed, it showed that it is important to not put all the marketing eggs into a single basket. 

There have been several important points made in the marketing world in regards to the outage, and one of the biggest ones is the understanding that we only “rent” Facebook and its services. Facebook is the landlord and we are the tenants. 

If the landlord was to sell the house tomorrow, where would marketers go? Because this isn’t the first outage, this has shown that email marketing is still one of the reigning champions of the marketing strategy! 

We would like to state that our team is not anti-social media marketing! Almost all of our marketing strategies revolve around Facebook and other platforms, but it was a great teaching moment for everyone. Email marketing is more relevant than ever and here’s why:

1. Stay in touch with customers

When sending emails, a company can ensure that it is reaching a large number of its audience still. While Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms were not down, not all companies use those platforms. During the moment that Facebook or Instagram is down, do not panic and make new accounts. 

Simply put that energy into transitioning the content to fit an email marketing campaign. If the post was about a blog, new service, or even a promotion, transition it into email marketing. 

That is the beauty behind email marketing, it provides the ability to stay in touch with users while also repurposing content for now and in the future. From there, any email marketing management company would express that consumers who opt-in to the emails are interested in your content. (Especially if Facebook or Instagram is down.) 

2. Consumers opt-in to emails

Consumers opt-in to your emails, so the general consensus can be said that they want to consume your content. Even those old email marketing lists can be revived, and those older customers could be jolted by that email! 

With over 205 billion emails sent each day, make sure that your emails are the ones that consumers want to read! 

3. Agile marketing

Since COVID-19, the concept of agile marketing has started to come back to life. While agile marketing never went away, it did show how simply switching gears in moments of change or chaos can continue to get marketing materials out. 

What is agile marketing? As McKinsey & Company explains from one company’s mistake, agile means time, and more than likely, it means time as in right now. This company was an international bank that was looking to see how customers would respond to new email offers and opt-ins. 

After eight weeks of debate and legal counsel, it was ready to go. A website has 0.05 milliseconds to grab a consumers’ attention, and by the eight-week mark, their offer could have expired. 

Agile marketing needs to be quick, and any more than a couple of hours could be the difference between an agile campaign and too much conversation about making said change. 

4. Continue to grow

Any email marketing management company would express the opportunity to continue to grow with email marketing. This can be done in physician offices with patients who opt-in to email messages and updates. This can be done with thrift stores with customers who want to get more discounts or know holiday events. This can be done for startups to continue their growth throughout their business. 

The moral of this story is that email marketing is still alive, and it does provide the ability to continue to grow as a business. 

Coming up with killer email marketing campaigns or managing these campaigns can be difficult. This is why it is important to ensure that you have an email marketing management company in place to help with the design and execution of these email campaigns, and in the meantime, don’t be afraid to put some of your eggs into social media marketing!