Why Is Email Marketing More Effective Than Social Media?

Marketing has always lied at the core of every business. Regardless of a scale or niche of a company, the only way to succeed is by investing effort, time, and money in promoting it.

Today, the situation hasn’t changed and good marketing is still the key to success. However, due to the global digitalization, the way businesses used to promote themselves is now different. These days, the easiest way to connect with potential customers is through the Internet. People spend lots of time surfing the Web and that’s where they now learn about new brands and products. Therefore, businesses are shifting most of their marketing efforts to the Internet.

Speaking of digital marketing, it comes in all shapes and kinds. Today, there are lots of opportunities companies use to promote themselves. However, among all available channels, email and social media seem to be the most trending ones. So, which one is more effective?

email marketing

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What Is Email Marketing?

This type of marketing implies leveraging email channels for increasing brand awareness, promotion, cultivate relationships with current and potential clients, keep them updated on the company’s news, and much more.

Email marketing has been around for quite a while. Its first practices date back to near the same time when the Internet became available. Thus, it is fair to say that it is the most time-tested form of online marketing.

Today, with the availability of a wide range of different online channels, some people believe that email marketing has long been outdated. Well, they couldn’t be more wrong! Even now, email remains one of the most powerful tools in online marketing. In the USA alone, as many as 85% of retailers confirm that email marketing is their most efficient tactic for customer acquisition.

Why Your Business Needs Email Marketing?

Although it has been around all along, email marketing has been constantly evolving, so today it is just as useful as other marketing tools or even more!

If you are not quite sure if your business needs to engage in it, here is some food for thought – 94% of people from the Internet’s population use email. This basically means that if you are not using it, you are missing out on lots of potential business opportunities. But, wait – there is more! A survey found that 75% of adult Internet users actually say that email marketing is their most preferred form of marketing.

Apart from that, email marketing also has the following benefits:

  • Outreach – obviously if 94% of Internet users are using email, if you use this channel for marketing you can reach a wider audience.
  • Cost – unlike many other online marketing tools, email is much more cost-effective.
  • Versatility – unlike most social media, email providers have much more diversified demographics, meaning that people of all genders, ages, and social statuses all use it.
  • Customer relationships – it has been proven that email marketing helps strengthen your company’s relationship with clients.
  • ROI – as a rule, the ROI of your email marketing efforts will be pretty high because you don’t have to use paid ads to reach your recipients there. Besides, tracking the ROI is much simpler via such channels.

As you can see, email marketing has quite a few pros, which is why it still makes sense to use it.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

This type of marketing implies using various social media channels to build a brand, connect with potential and current customers, drive traffic, and boost sales. In contrast to email marketing, this tactic has evolved not so long ago.

At first, businesses were mostly using social media to share news and content related to their brand and (hopefully) drive some additional traffic to their website. Today, the situation has changed drastically. Over the past years, social media channels have been evolving rapidly, offering businesses more and more new marketing opportunities.

At this point, with the help of the most popular channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others, companies can lead targeted marketing campaigns, use paid advertisements, and, thus, gain more benefits of their social media presence. Now, as many people spend more time on social media, businesses can use them to engage the audience, increase awareness, build solid relationships with clients, and generate more profit.

One of the biggest stumbling points of social media compared to email marketing is that it depends heavily on the content. Not to say that your email marketing campaign doesn’t require generating high-quality content – it does – but, generally, creating good content for social media is trickier. The issue is that apart from engaging and unique (use this link to find a convenient plagiarism checking tool) written content, social media channels also need excellent visual content. Despite this fact, many brands find it a very effective marketing tactic.

Why Your Business Needs Social Media Marketing?

Investing in social media marketing also has its purpose. First of all, it is worth mentioning that social media channels give you an opportunity to develop a solid business image. All popular brands nowadays use these channels to connect with their audience and build awareness. Popular social networks have billions of active users, which means using them can help you expand the outreach of your business.

Another big benefit of social networks is that they help encourage engagement. Visual content is a new way to connect with prospects and if you do it right, it can help boost engagement, drive traffic, and increase sales.

Speaking of the benefits of social media marketing for business it is impossible not to mention the effectiveness of paid ads. Channels like Instagram and Facebook give companies a possibility to create excellent campaigns, perfectly targeted to their potential customers. 

Finally, since social media have matured a lot over the past years, such channels now offer businesses an easy, convenient, and free opportunity to track the effectiveness of their campaigns. For example, it doesn’t cost a penny to create a business account on Instagram, but it does offer some great tracking tools to check how well your publications engage the audience.

Top 7 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is More Effective

Choosing between social media and email marketing, which tactic would you choose? Although many people believe that email marketing is way too outdated, there are actually quite a few reasons that prove it can be even more beneficial than social media marketing.

If you are wondering why email marketing should be included in your overall strategy, here are the top 7 reasons that prove its effectiveness compared to social media: 

1. Better User Demographics

Regardless of your business’s niche, you probably have an ideal customer profile in mind. What is his approximate age? Where is your ideal client based? Answering these basic questions can help you target your campaigns better and get the desired results. However, what if we tell you that certain consumer groups remain out of your reach in social media? That basically means that you are missing them out. However, using the email you don’t and that’s one of the biggest reasons why email marketing is more powerful!

An email has much more diversified user demographics compared to social networks. Just to give you a better idea of what we mean, let us show you some numbers:

ChannelEmail Social Media
Total users3.8 billion3.4 billion
Users aged 15-2491%88%
Users aged 25-4493.4%78%
Users aged 45-6490.5%64%
Users aged 65+85.5%37%

Based on these stats, you can see how all age groups use email, whereas social media channels are not so popular among elder users. This means that email marketing campaigns have the potential to cover more users.

2. Website Traffic

Another big reason why email marketing is generally more effective is that it can drive more traffic to your website. Here is a thing – you can have hundreds of thousands of subscribers on social media, but it won’t mean that your sales will go up. If you are not selling directly from your Instagram account, the number of followers or engaged users will not matter, the main indicator of success is the website traffic you were able to generate.

In terms of traffic, you can boost it with the help of social media. However, email marketing has been proven to drive more visitors directly to your website. This happens due to a different nature of email than social media. Clicking on your message in the inbox, a user is already potentially interested in what you are offering. Thus, the chances that such a user will open a link are higher.

email marketing website trafffic

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3. Control

One thing we love the most about email marketing is that it gives you complete control of who sees your message. When it comes to social networks, as well as paid and organic search, it is always something or someone else who determines who, where, and when will see your content. An email subscription list, on the contrary, is fully under your control. There is no algorithm that will decide who should receive your newsletters – it is you who shapes the list.

4. More Chances to Get Noticed

Unlike social media, which are mostly used for entertainment, emails are used for personal and business communication. This means that people tend to check their emails more often.

According to reports, at least 91% of people check their email every single day and most people would check it more than once a day. It is not possible to say the same about social media. People can easily go a day or a few not checking feeds in social media. According to stats, about 74% of Facebook users and only 63% of Instagram users log in daily.

These numbers show that if you are running an email marketing campaign it will likely get noticed by a larger number of users, whereas some people who use social media not on a daily basis may miss your publications.

5. Cost-Efficiency

It is not a secret that marketing in social media works best if you use paid ads. There are some tactics that will let you grow your audience and increase engagement naturally. However, to reach the best results, you would probably have to invest heavily in the advertisement.

Email marketing, on the contrary, is much more cost-effective. It is an inexpensive (and, sometimes, even free) way to reach out to your current and potential customers and stay in touch with them. 

6. Credibility

As was already mentioned earlier, 75% of users confirm that email is their most preferred form of marketing. Email marketing is usually more personalized. Instead of addressing millions of subscribers with a single publication, email marketers use various techniques to make each their newsletter look as if it was created specifically for a particular user and people like it.

Due to better personalization, email marketing helps build a brand’s credibility and promote trust in customers, thus, strengthening your relationships with them.

7. Better Conversion

Finally, the last and probably the most significant reason that proves why email marketing is more powerful than social media is that it converts much better! Numerous studies have proven than it is much easier to acquire customers through email newsletters through social media channels. Just think about this for a minute – a study has shown that people who receive email promotions spend 138% more than those who don’t receive offers through email.

The Bottom Line

So, is email marketing really more preferable than social media marketing? Based on everything we’ve mentioned above, it is fair to say that both tactics offer some nice pros.

Email marketing may be more effective in terms of ROI, costs, versatility, and outreach. That is why it is a good opportunity that businesses should not miss out.

However, it is also worth noting that there is no one-works-for-all strategy. Tactics that work for one company, may not at all be effective for another one. That is why winning marketing strategies don’t focus on a single channel.

To get the most benefit it is advisable to take a multi-faceted approach and link a variety of marketing channels and tools into one, overall strategy. Different techniques work perfectly fine together and can double the positive outcome.

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