Facebook messaging platform set to change email marketing

Facebook recently announced its developing its own messaging service to allow users to send emails, messages and texts from within their Facebook account. This is likely to have a significant impact on how we as marketers use email to communicate with customers and prospective customers.

Priority will be given to messages received from existing friends and contacts, with all other messages going into an ‘other’ folder. Users will also be given the facility to ‘bounce’ other messages. Facebook say that this will put their users in control over who they want to hear from.

What this will do is encourage users to stay within Facebook and use its service to communicate with everyone else. Facebook will want its own email service to be the only messaging platform its members use, which will put it in competition with Gmail and Outlook among others. The danger in the short-term will be to make it more difficult for brands and others without a pre-existing relationship to get in front of Facebook users.

However this move by Facebook also serves to emphasis what we already know. What is fundamentally important is to establish and build relationships with customers. If we can get that right, then this move by Facebook, if it comes off, will actually work in our favour as our messages will be competing against fewer other brands for the attention of our customers.