5 reasons why email marketing is more effective than social media
Unless you have a very strong reason to choose social media, we recommend focusing on email marketing. It is both simpler and more effective.
Before we start – this is not an attack on social media marketing. It is a good activity among many, but what often happens is that many strive for likes and shares, and forget to measure actual sales. It is not surprising that many think social media is the way to go. It is newer and trendier, while email can feel like it has existed since the dawn of time.
It is just that if you look at the actual numbers, email refuses to stop performing. Email marketing is the very backbone of Amazon, and you do not become the world's richest person by being bad at marketing.
Below are five of the most important reasons why email marketing works as well as it does. Happy reading!
1. Email has a higher click-through rate
Derek Halpern is a well-known name for many interested in digital marketing, and he used his own channels to conduct an interesting experiment. He shared the same link via Twitter and email, and the results spoke for themselves: The email generated 25 times more clicks.
Mailmunch reports the following engagement figures (combined clicks, comments, retweets, and so on):
Email: 3.57%
Facebook: 0.07%
Twitter: 0.03%
Why is this?
The answer is complex, but it likely has a lot to do with the fact that signing up for a mailing list requires a bit more commitment, meaning you also get more engaged followers on email than on Facebook, for example. Furthermore, it is probably much easier for many to scroll past something on Facebook or Twitter than to leave an email unopened in their inbox. Importantly, email is more accepted as a sales channel. On social media, it can often feel more intrusive, or simply uninteresting.
2. You actually own your contacts
If you want to advertise via social media, you are dependent on pleasing changing and sometimes very obscure algorithms to reach potential buyers. Changes can suddenly ruin your efforts, and in the worst case, users may even leave the platform. Your email lists belong to you alone, which means you only need to focus on sending your followers content they want, without also having to appeal to the robots that control what gets shown.
It is estimated that only 6% of your followers actually see the content you post in their Facebook feed. Remember – these are people who have actively clicked "follow this page"!
As long as you avoid being marked as spam, your email always delivers. This results in a medium where a 20–40% open rate is a realistic goal to aim for.
3. Email marketing costs less
How do you reach more than 6% of your followers on Facebook?
You will have to pay.
The more people you want to reach, the more you have to pay. That is the business model. Email has no business model in the same way, so it costs far, far less.
Read also: 6 important questions you should ask before choosing a newsletter provider
4. You get a higher return on your investment
Email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools for digital marketing. According to Litmus, newsletters are unmatched when it comes to ROI (return on investment). We are talking up to 36 times the effort. If you spend one krone on email marketing, 36 kroner can come back in return.
For comparison, we can look at what marketers think about social media: 34% of marketers said they were unsure about measuring the return on investment of social media marketing activities. Part of the reason is likely that social media is a harder channel to utilise optimally than email, but if there is a simple channel that yields a high return, why use the difficult one?
5. Easier to personalise email
One of the great advantages of digital over traditional marketing is that it is far easier to reach the exact people you want to target. For example, you can advertise to different custom audiences on Facebook, but your business page itself is still the same for everyone. Furthermore, it requires a lot of trial and error – and money. Twitter is out of the question.
When you market your business via email, you can easily get people to state their interests and other key characteristics when they sign up, allowing you to send very different newsletters to different lists. You can even personalise down to the individual level via merge tags and behavioural history – for both the beginner and the expert.
When should you use social media?
Our recommendation is clear – use email. However, social media has its uses, and it can work very well as a first step to gather people for your email lists. Furthermore, social media gives you the opportunity to go viral, which is not possible via email. This is rare, however, so make sure you think realistically instead of betting on dream scenarios.
If you want to work smart with your marketing, you need to combine different activities in a way that is optimal for your specific business.
But – start with email.