It’s easy to rely on social media marketing for all your marketing strategies because everyone seems to be doing it and because it’s simple and direct. It’s not a good idea to concentrate on just one channel of marketing especially if your social networks aren’t helping to reach your target audience. Social media marketing can be time-consuming if you don’t have a good system. If you don’t have a social media presence or you don’t have a social media account, consumers can lose trust in your brand.
When it comes to email marketing it can at times get intense because of all the writing of newsletter articles, formatting, and putting them in newsletter templates. However, newsletters are a great way of announcing new products and driving add-on sales and using email marketing regularly keeps your business in potential customer’s mind. Both channels of marketing are part and parcel of your online marketing strategy, but the time and effort you dedicate to each boil down to the ROI.
Let’s look at the differences between these two channels of marketing.
Number of people you can reach
As a business owner, you want to send messages that will reach as many people as possible and email can help you do that. The email has been there long before social media was so it has a wider user base. It’s estimated that more than 4 billion people globally use email and Facebook being the most popular social media platform has 1.9 billion active users every month with Instagram having 600 million and Twitter having 317 million active users every month.
People check their emails more frequently than social media with 58% checking their emails every morning before Facebook, the weather, or doing any Google search. And 9 out of 10 email users check their emails at least once a day. With these numbers, there is a pretty good chance your subscribers will see your marketing emails.
When it comes to social media, your posts and tweets might not be noticed by users. This is because there are too many updates to fit on an average news feed so some of the posts, tweets, and updates from businesses and people users follow may never be seen. For you to increase your organic reach on social media users have to engage with your posts which can be at times difficult.
Results and return on investment (ROI)
The whole purpose of marketing is to get results. That being said, you need to find the best marketing channel that drives more click-throughs, customer engagement, and conversions. While 1 out of 5 marketing emails gets opened with a 3.57% click-throughs, Facebook has a 0.07% click-throughs. You can use one method to track one brand but doesn’t work for another making it difficult to do a comparison. The best way to get your ROI is to use email marketing but incorporate a social media marketing plan that your target audience can relate with.
Social media is a great way of driving traffic to your website by coming up with content that can go viral, pay for social media ads, or you can buy 50 instagram likes to boost your blog or posts. User-generated content can also drive traffic and leads. Email marketing can be a great way of driving sales, generating leads, and increasing customer retention.
Driving sales
For your company to drive sales, you need deals and discounts and people use promotional emails in their inbox. 60% of consumers sign up for brand emails to get promotional emails while 20% of users on social media follow brands. Consumers have no problem receiving promotional emails in their inbox and most customers say that they have made purchases as a result of a marketing message they received through their email.
Although the majority of internet users globally trust social media for product research and purchase products online, making the jump from social research to social purchase is a bit difficult. Maybe the solution is to keep product research, customer service, and product purchase under one roof.
Security and targeting
The email has greater security than social media. No one can take away or wipe out your email list, but the same can’t be said for your list of social media followers. There will always be a risk no matter how small that your social media account can be shut down and if your main marketing strategy is social media you still have an email list as backup.
Targeting is also an important point to take into consideration so that your marketing strategy can be successful. You can segment your email list so that you can target a specific demographic of your target audience. You can control who sees your promotions by using paid social media ads, but when you use organic social media you don’t have much control of who sees your posts thus reducing your targeting potential.
Kind of response you get
When you update your Facebook status or post a tweet on Twitter, you expect people to respond because social media is a platform used for creating dialogue. A promotional ad you though would be a quick advert can develop into a customer service conversation that can draw many users into the conversation. This can increase your followers and even lead to conversions that can lead to purchases. However, email marketing is much easier and more direct. Once you send a message the only response that can make you act as if the user makes a purchase otherwise you send and forget till you receive a response.
List segmentation
One of the most important points in an effective email marketing strategy is the ability to segment your list. This raises your conversion rates, ensures you send the right message to the right audience, makes sure that your emails are welcome, reduce unsubscribers, read and act on them. You can’t segment your list on social media so the messages you send are received by everyone irrespective of their interests.
Final thoughts
Social media and email marketing are very different. While email marketing is good at direct conversions and generating website traffic, social media more effective at engaging with your audience. A well-rounded approach is a much more effective marketing strategy by using both email marketing and social media.
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