• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 5, 2011

At the Email Insider Summit, Pontiflex VP Jordan Cohen said that Facebook and Twitter aren't the principal challenge to email as a marketing vehicle since they are mainly entertainment vehicles. Actually, social media has proven to be more of a threat to TV and magazines.

“Two totally separte things, I think its been fallacious to compare email to Facebook and Twitter,” he said.

Mobile communications offers more of an opportunity for email marketers to extend their work.

“Mobile has been this really disruptive platform," Cohen said. "That has changed the game for email marketers and they need to get on-board with that.”

Nationwide executive Brian Jaffe said his company could move more into SMS, even as a transactional platform, but so far direct response and email have been dominant.

On the question of frequency, Nationwide, like others, is still struggling. One problem is if there is certain number put on it, some parts of the company make send out emails at the expense of others. "We don't know what the magic solution is --the algorithm is -- which business unit suffers because they aren't able to send their message" because a quota is filled.