5 Reasons Email Marketing is More Effective than Social Media

What’s the first thing you check on your phone in the morning? For 58 percent of users, it’s straight to their email inbox. Meanwhile, only 11 percent said they check Facebook first. On the surface, social media marketing is more exciting than email campaigns, but would you believe it’s way less effective? Here are five reasons why you should spend more time on email marketing campaigns than status updates.

1. More Users - Everyone who uses a computer has an email address. It’s required to sign up for anything else, including social media platforms. According to a 2018 study, there will be more than 3.8 billion email users before the close of 2018. That’s 100 million more than in 2017. Some social media platforms are also blocked or censored around the world, notably China, making it unlikely that the numbers would ever come close to email users. There are three times more email accounts than there are Facebook and Twitter accounts combined. Targeting your audience through email ensures more people have a way to communicate with your business online.
2. Higher Visibility - Social media algorithms are mostly to blame here. Users don’t see every single tweet, post, and pin from the people and businesses they follow. There are just too many updates to fit each one on an average news feed. According to Social Ogilvy, only about 6 percent of your fan base sees anything you post on Facebook. Overall, people have fewer new emails per day than tweets or Facebook updates. That means your email is competing with fewer messages. Another bonus? People actually have to interact with emails, whether it’s opening the message or even just clicking “delete.”
3. Built-in Audience - Everyone on your email list has already opted-in to receive promotions from you. This means they’re less likely to be annoyed, even if you are employing sales tactics. In short, your email list members are already your fans, and they’ll be more receptive to your marketing materials in their inbox than on their news feed.
4. Higher Engagement - Even though social media sometimes looks like a flurry of activity, email marketing has a much higher engagement and click rate than Facebook and twitter. Email marketing campaigns can see 50-100 times more clicks than social media campaigns. What’s more, 66 percent of consumers said they’ve made purchases as a result of an email, while only 20 percent made purchases because of a Facebook promotion, followed by only 6 percent of users purchasing something because of twitter.
5. Easier to Build an Audience - Building an email list is easier than keeping a social media audience engaged continuously. It only takes one opt-in from a consumer for them to be on your list compared to battling for attention daily within an algorithm on Facebook. Building an email list is an ongoing process that can happen anywhere, anytime. Each real-life event and online interaction is a potential opportunity for another signup. Here are some tips for building an email marketing list.

Of course, social media has a few distinct advantages. The platforms help you connect and engage with new people — people who may one day opt-in to your email list. Social media posts also have a shareability quality that is missing from email. So you can use your social media posts to engage your audience and grow your email list, effectively turning your social media followers into email subscribers.

Bottom line, of all the marketing strategies you can adopt, email marketing gives you the highest return on investment (ROI). The median ROI for email is 122 percent; social media comes in at a distant second place, with an ROI of only 28 percent. In other words, you should be spending more time on your emails and less time on social, though for most of us, that’s reversed.

If you have questions about email marketing, contact us for a free consultation.