Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Email Marketing vs Social Media Marketing: What’s the Best for Your Business?

Marketers use various strategies for firms to market and raise brand awareness. Social media marketing and email marketing are two of the most popular and successful ways to accomplish marketing objectives. Both are magnificent in their own ways. As of 2021, there were around 3.78 billion users of social media and 4.1 billion users of email globally, according to Statista. This amount represents about 48% of the world’s population.

Social networking is becoming more and more popular every day. Nevertheless, we are unable to control how emails affect their users’ ability to transact. The issue at hand is which is superior. Which of the two can influence the target audience more effectively? 

What is Email Marketing?

A type of digital marketing called email marketing uses emails to spread brand recognition. It informs customers about the newest items, discounts, and services to help them remember the brand. The following are some advantages of email marketing:

1. Strengthen Relationships, Loyalty & Trust

Building individualised interactions with present and potential clients through email marketing is a terrific strategy. The readers of your newsletters and emails will come to know, like, and trust you and your business if you write them well. Consumers also do business with trusted companies.

2. Increase Brand Awareness & Stay Top of Mind

Consumers are reminded of your business, products, and services every time an email is delivered to them. This helps customers remember your business when it’s time to make a purchase.

3. Segmentation

Email marketing allows you to establish lists of each market segment based on demographics, interests, previous behaviour, etc. This allows you to develop marketing messages that are specifically tailored to each target audience. With the help of this incredibly successful marketing strategy, each segment will closely relate to your marketing message.

4. Low Cost & Good ROI

Comparatively speaking to other marketing strategies, email marketing is relatively affordable. For every dollar invested, email marketing typically returns $44.25 in profit.

5. Easy to Use

An email campaign may be set up quite quickly. You may upload subscriber information, segment your lists, use email templates, fill in your content, and send out emails to subscribers regularly using the many resources and software providers for email marketing available online. Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are two of our preferred email marketing services providers. Instead of using a pre-made template, having a customised email template that aligns with your company’s brand can be much more successful.

6. Easy to Measure

For each email sent, metrics and statistics display open, click-through, bounce, and conversion rates. Understanding what is working and what needs improvement depends on this knowledge.

Industries Benefited from Email Marketing

According to a Snovio labs study, 72% of clients who use email for business communications prefer it to social networking. The following are some of the sectors that profit from email marketing:

• Automotive

This is the leading sector for email marketing to increase sales. It’s simple to keep track of clients’ preferences when using email marketing. With just one purchase, one can make a sizable profit. The sector uses email marketing for advertising new models, providing insurance, and more. As a result, email marketing has been particularly beneficial to the car industry.

• Pharmaceutical

According to a poll with 4000 physicians as participants, only one-third of doctors use social media. Because doctors typically don’t use social media, the pharmaceutical industry does its email marketing.

Popular Companies Benefiting from Email Marketing

Some of the best examples of successful organisations using email marketing include the following:

• Airbnb
• Uber
• Bonobos
• Cook Smarts
• Kate Spade
• Litmus
• BuzzFeed
• PayPal
• Drift

What is Social Media Marketing?

The term “social media marketing” describes the process of promoting goods and services on social media sites. It is the most thrilling and effective approach to finding new, targeted customers worldwide. The following are just a few advantages of social media marketing:

• Brand Awareness

Companies of all sizes and in all sectors aspire to establish their brands. It’s understandable why social media would be among the top channels for promoting your brand, given its millions of users worldwide. Promoting your business and highlighting your goods or services is a fantastic approach. Many firms also use social media as a platform for news, product updates and releases, and other information. In today’s technologically advanced world, social media is one of the best ways to spread your material to as many people as possible, in addition to your website.

• Increased Revenue

All businesses aim to generate as much income as they can. You can lose out on the second source of revenue if social media isn’t part of your marketing efforts. This relates to brand recognition since the more people who learn about your company, the more opportunity you have to expand your clientele. You may reach your target audience through social media on several different channels and word-of-mouth advertising.

Although many of the people you’ll reach might not be specifically interested in your good or service, they might nevertheless spread the word to others who might be.

Several social networking platforms can let you generate money directly, depending on your selling and the kind of material you upload.

Through social networking, you may buy and sell goods, schedule appointments, and gather consumer leads. Even while you might be able to increase your revenue through organic social media posts, investing in paid ads can help you take your social media marketing to the next level. You can reach hundreds (or thousands) of like-minded people with even a small budget, and they might be willing to buy your goods or use your services. 

• Improved SEO

A strong SEO strategy comprises various elements, but many people are shocked to realise that social media presence can also aid in increasing ranks. Although your actual social media marketing activities won’t immediately boost SEO, other people’s behaviours might.

Understanding how SEO functions can help you comprehend this. For instance, remember that SEO significantly relies on high-quality backlinks. Your finest material should be displayed on social media because people share intriguing stuff. The more links to your company’s website there are, the more likely something will become viral, which can greatly increase your website’s domain authority. Social media is a terrific way to get things going, even while it can take some time for exceptional information to become widely shared.

• Better Customer Service

Both large and small brands depend on top-notch customer service to succeed. These days, most businesses provide a variety of ways for customers to contact them with questions, requests for additional information, or issues that need to be resolved.

Customers used to contact businesses by phone, email primarily, and even live chat, but now many utilise social media as their major method of communication. Social media generally results in a better overall customer service experience since it allows businesses a better chance to communicate with customers and typically increases response times.

• Retargeting Opportunities

As was briefly discussed previously, social media marketers have the choice to increase the size of their audience by funding paid ads. But more precisely, social media is a great venue for retargeting advertisements. Reach people who are more likely to become paying customers by running social media advertising that is tailored to people who have already visited your website and have looked at particular product or service pages. 

Industries Benefited from Social Media Marketing

Around 92 per cent of all consumers trust social media over all other forms of advertising, according to a BarnRaisers survey. The following sectors had the biggest gains from social media marketing:

• Entertainment

The entertainment sector uses social media marketing the most compared to other industries. According to research, 63.2 per cent of all Facebook posts are related to entertainment. Some industries include telecom, retail, financial services, beverage, and food. One of the better examples of an entertainment area that makes good money is Instagram.

• Retail

After the entertainment industry, which has benefited from social media marketing, follows retail. Famous examples include live chat boxes or sessions on Facebook or Instagram. Additionally, it helps display product and service features, which is excellent for today’s retail start-ups. Additionally, positive customer reviews on social media operate as word-of-mouth and draw in new clients.

• Real Estate

A real estate website quotes a survey claiming that 44% of users effectively attract new customers to their properties through social media. The real estate business as a whole, including brokers, agents, property managers, and developers, uses social media for promotion. Social media makes it relatively simple to highlight the features of properties in engaging ways.

Popular Companies Benefiting from Social Media Marketing:

Some of the top businesses that successfully employ social media marketing are the ones listed below:

• GoPro
• Nike
• Spotify
• Wayfair
• Pop-Tarts
• National Geographic
• Starbucks
• Dove
• Wendy’s

Social Media Marketing vs Email Marketing

In the following, we will discuss which is better among email and social media marketing from different perspectives:

Which is Effective in Reaching The Target Audience?

Approximately 99 per cent of email consumers check their mailbox daily, according to OptiMonster 2020. Some individuals may check their emails up to 20 times each day.

On the other hand, the population that logs onto social media first thing in the morning is more inclined to utilise it for personal reasons. So, people are generally more likely to check their emails than their social media accounts first throughout the workday.

Every business wants to reach its target market when it comes to targeting to succeed. You have control over who sees your business’s paid social media adverts. On the other hand, organic adverts provide you with no control over who sees them and who doesn’t. On the other hand, email marketing allows you to segment your complete target audience list for the greatest outcomes. Email marketing is successful in this situation because it will assist you in better reaching your target audience.

Which provides a higher return on investment (ROI)?

Return on investment (ROI) is the term used to describe the measurement of profit following an investment or the comparison of revenue from numerous investments at a specific time. According to DMA 2019, email marketing may yield a return of almost £42 for every £1 invested.

However, according to research that appeared in Forbes, just about 6% of marketers were able to use social media for customer relationship management, and 56% were still contemplating how to do it. The reality is that social media ROI can only be profitable if you are really popular on a few platforms. Therefore, the likelihood of getting satisfactory results via social media decreases. Email marketing thus emerges as the winner in this scenario.

Which Can Attract New Audiences Better?

Email marketing has a much larger user base than social media, but attracting new customers is challenging. Because social media has no boundaries, this is. You’ve probably seen several channels with many followers, especially Instagram and Facebook, which is a terrific way to draw in new viewers.

Customers will discuss your services and products on social media if you offer them in-depth and practical information, which will directly increase traffic to your brand channels. Once your postings begin going viral, your business can grow tremendously. Another strategy to reach new audiences is to produce more sponsored adverts for your items. As a result, this is the area where social media marketing appears to be winning.

How Can You Effectively Combine Email and Social Media Marketing?

• Given that each type of marketing has advantages and disadvantages, what if we combined them both and focused on their benefits only? So, to ensure the success of your business, here are some efficient ways to mix email and social media marketing:
• Reuse the content across the two platforms. Your time will be saved, and it is also reasonably priced.
• Create a similar content calendar for both platforms and follow a similar content strategy.
• Utilise social media to gather email addresses from followers of your brand. Add call-to-action buttons to social media posts to encourage users to enter their email addresses so the business can continue with email marketing.
• Plan interesting giveaways or contests on social media and gather user emails. For instance, you could provide a prize in exchange for users coming up with a catchphrase for your company. This will keep your brand fresh in users’ minds and encourage audience participation in contests.
• As you receive favourable comments from social media users about the channels, you can send emails to your audience with feedback that will help you turn them into paying clients.

Conclusion

Here, the conflict between email marketing and social media marketing is resolved. According to what we saw, email marketing is still preferred from various angles. But we are powerless to stop social media, which has 3.96 billion users worldwide, from growing popularity every day.

To increase the chances of success, businesses should therefore combine their social media and email marketing efforts and sell their goods and services accordingly.

Edited by Prakriti Arora