With all the buzz around social media marketing now a days, if you think email marketing is dead, you’re wrong. Till date email marketing is alive and kicking and is a lot better than social media marketing when it comes to ROI.
Although people today spend more time on social networks than on reading emails, but is social media marketing really good for marketing purposes? And if its good is it a better marketing medium compared to email marketing?
Lets see.
I have written below the top 7 points that compare social media marketing with email marketing and proves why emails are better than tweets and facebook posts.
1. Social updates may get skipped but not emails
You may have thousands of fans and followers on social media, emails will still be more powerful.
You may think that your followers are very loyal and they respond to every post that you make, but practically that’s not the case always.
Studies show that the response you get from sending emails to your subscribers is lot more than that you get from your facebook wall post.
The reason is – People have very low attention span when they are on social networks and they can easily skip your posts or shares as there are so many other things to look at.
But, in case of emails people hardly skip them. To the worst they’ll read the subject line of your email and not open it, but they’ll definitely read the subject line and know that you’ve sent them a message. So its up to you how good you can make your subject lines so that your subscribers open your emails.
2. Emails are much more personal
With emails you can personalize each email that to send according to the recipient. You can greet them individually with their names and make your emails much more personal.
But that’s not the case with social networks. You can not personalize each facebook post or tweet you publish. You have to send one generic copy to all your fans and followers.
3. Frame of mind is different with emails and social media
When people use social media, they are normally thinking about chatting with friends, viewing photos, sharing posts and so on. They are not in their buyer mode and everything they do is casual.
But with emails they have a different frame of mind. They think of emails as a more formal medium of conversation and take your business emails seriously. And hence you are able to convert more.
4. Email marketing allows segmentation
When you are targeting a specific audience, you need to segment your list into different categories according to user demographics, age, gender and so on. Email marketing allows you to segment your targets easily and send custom emails to each.
But, social marketing refrain you from doing that because all your posts, status and tweets are seen by all kinds of people, all at once and you can not segment them.
5. With emails you can target adult audience
According to this source 67% of adults use emails but only 46% of them use emails. So if you are in a niche where your target audience is adult people then social media may not the choice for you.
People who are older in age do not use social media extensively. They are still more inclined to using emails, if they use Internet at all.
6. Social networks – so many of them
With social media marketing you need to take care of so many social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pintrest, Linkedin etc all at once, to count a very few. You need to log into each one of them and send your updates individually.
But with emails there is only one dashboard and you can send as many emails as you want all from one place.
7. Emails have more add-to-cart rate, more conversion rate and leads to more page-views per visit compared to social media
According to this source, emails have 5 times more add-to-cart rate, 10 times more conversion rate and 2 times more page-views per visit as compared to social media. Now these are some real numbers and should be enough to convince the left-brained among you.
So this brings me to a conclusion that email marketing is a better marketing medium as compared to social media marketing and is 10 times better in terms of conversion.
But does that mean social media marketing is bad and you should stop doing it?
Definitely not.
Though emails are better, but that does not make the social media less effective. Social media also have its own pros and can be really helpful in some cases and niches. For example, your posts may get viral on social media and bring you a lot of traffic to your website or say if your posts get shared a lot, its good for SEO.
But largely emails win the game.
Now your turn. What do you think is better? Emails or Social media? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts.
