Social media has managed to cement its place as a critical marketing tool. It has evolved to be a lot more than a simple platform to post photos and share life updates. Email marketing too has become more critical and offers the highest ROI among all channels.
Both have their own strengths and marketers should focus on how both can work together instead of prioritizing either one.
Social media vs. email
Social media platforms rely on emails for a number of functions like welcome or confirmation emails and resetting passwords. Traditionally, you will not even be able to register on a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter without an email address.
There are more than 2.5 billion email users around the world which is twice as much as the number of daily active Facebook and Twitter users put together. This presents a unique opportunity to marketers to increase their revenue and traffic through platforms which most users are familiar with. Email is supposed to be around forty times more effective as compared to Twitter and Facebook when it comes to acquiring customers.
The main difference between sending emails vs. social posts is that subscribers can engage with emails when they reach their inbox in comparison to tweets or posts which need to be updated at the opportune time for maximum exposure. But even when it comes to cluttered inboxes, emails themselves have longer shelf lives as compared to instant social posts.
Leveraging social media
With social media platforms, marketers need to think of them as nothing more than creative outlets, as opportunities to provide fun, fresh messages in a simple manner for target audiences and customers not as a means of replacing email marketing.
Even though social media has had its ups and downs, there is no denying the fact that it is a revolutionary marketing tool. Also, it is very easy to integrate with email.
You can use social media platforms for promoting email content and even link to social profiles in your emails. Also, social media channels are excellent when it comes to communicating with target audiences fast, and email allows greater longevity of any relationship which was established through social platforms.
Marketers can make use of social media for getting in front of a wider audience who are looking to find interesting ideas and content. They can even use emails for communicating directly with people who’re interested and opt in for receiving more content.
Focus on both
It can be difficult to focus on two tools, but both of these do go well together. Additionally, both are affordable as marketing strategies for producing high conversion rates and engagement.
Marketers need to spend time developing strategies which play off both social and email to reap benefits from both. Marketing can do this through cross-promotion of key messages and top content across every channel.
Marketers have to balance their focus between social media and email marketing and use both tools for complementing each other instead of competing with each other.
