Discussion

5 ways email marketing trumps social media

“Did you know that email has nearly three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined? That’s a whopping 2.9 billion

As the above statistic confirms, email is the most popular online activity. As email marketing experts we thought it would be pretty biased of us to tell you how email marketing is so much better than social media marketing. Instead we’ve devised a blog with five points that prove email marketing trumps social media.

1. It’s Personal

It doesn’t matter how many followers you have on social media if you don’t know anything about them. You can’t individually target users with offers because you can’t determine their likes and dislikes. The best you can do with social media is put an offer out there and hope that enough potential customers see it. With email however, the opportunity arises to create personal relationships with customers. Using the original details that customers gave when they signed up to your mailing list you can: address customers by name, give out birthday vouchers, and check out previous products they bought or looked at. With information like this you can send out effective yet subtle, personal marketing emails like this one:

“Hi Jane,

Hope you’re happy with your bath salts!

Did you know we also sell moisturiser AND it’s half price this week?!”

By sending out emails like this one you can really revamp your marketing style. ‘Emails opened on smartphones…now account for 48% of total opens’ so it’s important to become more personal in your approach.

2. Brand Awareness

There are thousands of businesses competing for attention on social media. However, with email marketing there’s no one to compete with, when a customer reads an email the interaction occurs just between that customer and the business that has sent them the message. As mentioned above, email marketing is more personal than social media, but it also keeps your client’s brand at the top of the customer’s mind. There are several ways that this can be done, three examples that spring to mind are: a relevant subject line, an image related to your client’s brand, and an email signature. Anything that is consistent, for example, colour, font, and popular sayings will also reinforce the brand message of your client.

3. No Character Limit

Using social media as a marketing platform is often made difficult by the character restrictions that appear. Take Twitter for instance, the character limit is 140, no more. Of course, on Facebook you can create an almost limitless post, but is anyone really going to pay attention to that? Social media sites are made for little flashes of interesting information, to limit your marketing to this method creates an unnecessary hardship. Email marketing trumps social media here because not only is the character limit a lot larger, people are more likely to pay attention to what you have to say. As previously mentioned, there are hundreds of posts on social media that are made to be glanced at, then scrolled past and forgotten. But because emails are so direct, the call to action has more chance of becoming stuck in the customer’s mind. Additionally, having the space to write what you need to will improve the impact of your marketing.

4. It’s Cost Effective

No impactful marketing is free, it’s as simple as that. With Facebook you have to pay to boost posts to your own followers, with the option of paying extra for your post to appear to  a criteria of Facebook users that you have selected, e.g. 18-24 year old males that have an interest in business. Twitter follows a similar process by offering to promote your tweets in exchange for payment, but you are only charged whenever a user follows or retweets you. What these two examples have in common is that neither are guaranteed to get you a reaction, even if someone retweets your post what does that really do for your client’s business?

With email marketing however, you are guaranteed to get a reaction (even if that reaction is to be ignored) because you are targeting customers directly. Check out our email packages that are set up at one simple monthly cost (calculated upon how many emails you plan to send), whilst giving you the freedom to charge your clients as much as you like.

5. High Deliverability

You can physically measure the deliverability of emails and see how many have been opened and how many have been deleted. With social media you can also check how many people have seen your posts but this doesn’t give you any indication of whether they paid attention to it or just glanced at it in passing. The deliverability rate of emails is proven to be high and according to studies: ‘76% of email opens occur in the first two days after an email is sent’. As social media occurs within ‘real-time’ your posts may only be seen by a small portion of your client’s following and, depending on how many other accounts a user follows, your post may only stay visible for a matter of minutes before being replaced by more recent posts.

No marketing technique can directly reach as many customers in the cost-effective, personal way that emails can. For us, and for many customers out there, email trumps social media every time. If you’re looking for an easy way to manage all of your clients email-marketing campaigns under one virtual roof, then you’re in the right place. Contact us for more information or go straight ahead with our fourteen day free trial.

Thanks for reading!

Ready to try Instiller out?

Take a free & unlimited 14 day trial of Instiller and discover
how our solution could work for your agency.

Free trial

There's no commitment and we don't ask for payment details.