Slow to adopt the latest social media marketing strategies? Although Consumers may use Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare to communicate with their friends, that’s not necessarily how they want to engage with businesses. In fact, better results are likely if you send offers by email instead.

That’s the upshot of marketing company ExactTarget’s 2012 Channel Preference Survey. The study quizzed 1,481 respondents about their overall Internet usage, devices owned, personal communication habits, permission granting protocols and purchasing behaviors. ExactTarget offers a wide range of email, mobile and social media marketing services, so it had no axe to grind for any particular marketing channel.
The key finding: “Just because consumers embrace a channel for personal communications doesn’t mean that they want to receive direct marketing messages from your brand via that channel. Absent an invitation from consumers to engage through social channels, marketers should focus their efforts on optimizing communications through channels where consumers do want to hear from them.”
Which ones are those? Here’s how study participants overall responded when asked about their preferred channel for receiving permission-based promotional messages (i.e., “promotional messages from companies whom I have granted permission to send me ongoing information”):Email—77 percent

This again brings us back to a Mobile Loyalty Solution that works based off the consumers cellphone as the most likely method for promotional offers. These offers can be distinguished and tracked and uniquely identifying the end user either via a detection sensor or a barcode that is mailed.
Being late to the game is not so bad because this area of marketing is cutting edge and while interest is high there is very little in terms of adoption underway for many companies.