Email marketing vs. social media: Which wins? The truth is, they are two channels that pursue different objectives: social media marketing increases your reach to connect with more people, while email marketing is the ideal channel for retaining that audience and closing sales. Therefore, rather than choosing between one channel or the other, the best approach is to know how to combine them effectively.
1. Feed vs Inbox
To achieve our conversion goals, the first step is to appear in the feed from our followers and reach our subscribers' inboxes. To do this, we will need to keep in mind:
On social media: algorithms, relevant hashtags from our sector, peak usage times, and publishing content that encourages sharing or interaction.
In email campaigns: take care of deliverability so as not to trigger any anti-spam filters.
2. Conversion funnel
Social media helps expand your brand's reach, while email marketing is the ideal channel for retaining and building customer loyalty. This should define your objectives and guide the content you share accordingly.
This content must be adapted to the funnel stage or funnel of conversion where your audience is located, so they receive the content they need at the right time. Due to its characteristics, content better suited to the initial phase of the conversion will be most successful on social media. funnel, while in email you can create content for initial, intermediate and final phases.
3. Metrics
ROI: In terms of return on investment between one channel and another, email marketing remains at the top of the podium with a 3800 % ROI no more and no less (DMA, 2019), compared to 28 % for social media.
Specifically, social media managers point to measuring ROI as one of the main challenges of their daily work.
Average CTR: The CTR (Click-through Rate) The average reach of an email is 3.57 % compared to 0.07 % on Facebook and 0.03 % on Twitter for organically reached posts.
Frequency: While posting often will benefit you on social media (due to algorithms and being present in your audience's daily lives), in email marketing, an excessively high email frequency is usually the main reason for unsubscribing from a list.
Personalization: Email marketing allows you to segment your recipients by interests, demographics, or stage in the conversion funnel. You can even send A/B tests to two small portions of a list to see how they react to a specific element in variant A and variant B.
4. Similarities
Interaction: The first common aspect between the email marketing and the Social Media marketing These are channels that allow direct communication between brand and audience.
Branding: Both channels can significantly enhance the branding of your brand with consistency in design, logos, how you address your audience, or the type of content you share.
Content: Share interesting and educational content with your followers or subscribers, whether by promoting your own content or sharing curated content, In other words, a selection of content from your niche that provides value is fundamental in these two channels.
Mobile first: Viewing emails on a mobile device will account for 26 to 78% of your total email opens in 2021, depending on your target audience, product, and email type (EmailMonday).
As of October 2020, an estimated 4 billion social media users accessed the platform from mobile devices (Statista).
Automation: In Social Media, There is a wide variety of tools available to automate both posting entries and checking their performance.
In email, you can recreate sales funnels, flows of onboarding or online training through automated email flows, and even manage your contacts with automated tools.
Traffic: Both options redirect traffic to your website to increase it. If you track the links you include to your website from your channels using UTM parameters, or newsletter, you will be able to see in your Google Analytics Where do those visits come from?.
5. How to combine them
Use the data provided by one channel for the other: Unlike email marketing, Social media platforms provide a wealth of demographic data about your followers that you can use to segment your campaigns. e-mail.
Show targeted advertising to your followers: If you use the advertising network of Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, You can create custom audiences from a list of email marketing, This allows you to show specific ads to specific segments or lists (without having to manage subscribers and audiences separately). Simply export your lists or segments and add the file as an audience, and you're all set.
Include your social media links in the email: Include your social media profiles at the bottom of your emails so your subscribers can see which channels you use and follow you on one or another.
Conclusion
Social media and email marketing They have more in common than it seems: the goal of both is to connect with your audience through valuable content and to forge a natural, close and (most importantly) bidirectional relationship.
Your strategy email marketing and Social Media They have to go hand in hand, although you must always keep in mind the differences that characterize them as well.
