What's the effect of @Instagram.com addresses to email marketing?

It looks like Instagram is the next social sharing site to provide email addresses to its users. What will be the impact of this for email marketing?

Traffic is vital to any online service. Email marketing is one of the biggest traffic drivers for any business, and arguably the most profitable one. Are social sharing sites embracing email as part of their expansion?

In this blog post on TechCrunch.com, Ingrid Lunden (@ingridlunden) unveils the discovery of @Instagram addresses. By accident, a data collection company stumbled upon a list of @Instagram.com addresses in one of their data silo's. This instantly sparked the conversation about Instagram (owned by Facebook) rolling out email services as an extension to their business model too. Could it be that Instagram users get their own private mailbox inside this photo sharing site?

Rumours about Instagram expanding into messaging via other channels have been around for a while. Earlier this year, Om Malik wrote on his weblog Gigaom.com: ‘It is fundamentally my belief that most applications need a layer of communication — comments and lightweight signals such as Facebook’s likes are part of that layer. And so is messaging.’

No channel can survive on it’s own. Channels are dependent of each other. Facebook would’ve never been this successful if back in 2010 they had not added messaging services, like email. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg announced: “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it. This is the way that the future should work.”

Delivering the best experience to your users is all about channel integration and the right data.

It looks like Instagram is adding email services for their users. What do you see as the biggest opportunity for your email marketing program?