Not surprisingly, marketers are making customer acquisition and retention top priorities for 2010. According to a survey released by Unisfair, six out of 10 marketers said acquiring new customers would be critical in 2010, while 48 percent will focus on retaining current customers—a particularly important effort in the recession and a topic we recently explored in a very informative webinar.

Of the marketing channels available to them, social media was the top marketing tactic with 75 percent of respondents planning to increase use of the emerging channel as a way to acquire and retain customers. Search (51 percent) and email (48 percent) were right behind, while only 3 percent planned to increase spending on print advertising.

While search and email have proven to be excellent channels for driving customer acquisition and retention, it is still too early to understand what kind of impact social media will have on a marketer’s bottom line. With close to 300 million users on Facebook alone, there is no questioning the reach social media offers marketers, but will it deliver meaningful results? Like email, if done right, I believe social media will be effective. There are many parallels between social media and the email channel when it first became popular. The main thing to understand is that they are not exactly exclusive. Yes, consumers are communicating in social media, but that does not mean they have given up on email, and neither should marketers. Datran Media’s Nicholas Einstein penned a great article on this topic almost a year ago that I believe is still a relevant read today.