In a perfect world, we’d all have enough time to work on anything we wanted to in our business. Unfortunately real life isn’t perfect. No matter how much time you have to spend on your business, you probably don’t have enough time to do everything.
If you only have so much time per day or week, you might be wondering which is more important, doing email marketing, or social media. Entrepreneurs have been using email to communicate with their customers for decades now. While social media hasn’t been around as long, it’s become a very popular way to communicate as well.
If you don’t have enough time to do both, which should you choose? The answer is almost always email marketing. Email is more effective than social media at both generating sales and leads.
Email still has an average user engagement rate of forty percent. Compare this to Facebook’s at four percent and Instagram and Twitter’s at one percent. Your success requires regularly staying in touch with your target audience to stay at the top of their minds. Email marketing is a powerful tool for anyone running a business, as it helps them build and maintain relationships with customers.
Here are four main reasons why email marketing is more powerful than social media:
Email Marketing Generates Higher Conversion Rates
The cost-effectiveness of email marketing makes it highly desirable for small business owners to use. Even if you don’t enjoy writing email to send to your list, understand the statistics. The average email open-rate is around forty-three percent. The click rates are approximately 3.2 percent. In comparison, the average click rate for social media is roughly 1.3 percent.
If you’re looking for your message to be seen by people, email is the way to do it. You’ll have a lot more people see what you want them to see, and act on what you want them to act on.
Email Marketing is More Personal and Direct
Email marketing is personal and direct, so it’s more effective than social media. Unlike other forms of advertising, email marketing messages are less likely to be blocked by spam filters, and emails are delivered quickly to inboxes. Email marketing also makes it easier to segment your market and only share certain information. For example, while you’d want to send your new readers an email about who you are, you wouldn’t send that to someone who has been on your list for a while. This allows you to diversify your communication and engage in many different ways.
Plus, when you send emails to someone, you start to build a relationship with them. As they read your emails, they get to know you better. You share stories with them, and they learn about you. As they learn about you, they start to like and trust you more.
As they know, like, and trust you more, they’ll start to buy from you more, or buy through your links. This means you’ll earn more money.
When you’re using social media, who knows what messages people are seeing. They might only see some of them, and therefore not see everything you’re trying to say. They won’t get to know you, like you, and trust you as much, and therefore it’ll be harder to sell to them.
Plus, if someone signed up to your list, there was a reason for it. They must have liked something you said or something you were offering. If they see a message of yours on social media, it doesn’t mean anything since there are many ways they could have seen it.
Plus, if they’re reading your email, you have their full attention until they close that email. With social media, all their eyes have to do is wander an inch or less up or down the screen, and you’ve already lost their attention.
Email Marketing is More Affordable
Email marketing produces the best return on investment when compared to any other type of marketing out there. Email marketing campaigns are also not that costly. It’s much lower than running a successful social media campaign. The average cost per lead for an email campaign is one to two dollars, while the same metric for Facebook is roughly six to eight dollars per lead.
Email Marketing is Easier
Building a list with email is simpler, but it’s also more effective than a social media following for building a hungry list of buyers. This is because most people use email. It is estimated that roughly ninety-four percent of users on the internet have or use email. In addition, email is straightforward to understand and doesn’t require a lot of time to implement as social media does.
You go into your email marketing software, write an email, and click on what list or lists to send it to. It’s pretty quick and straightforward, especially after you’ve done it a few times. When it comes to social media however, it can be more difficult. Especially because each social media platform does things differently. This means that if you want to use multiple social media platforms, you’re going to have to learn how to use each one. Plus, with each platform you use, you’ll have to take the time to learn the distinctive features to maximize your results.
While this information is important to be aware of, that doesn’t mean you should ignore social media. Choosing social media over email is only something you should do if you don’t have a lot of time. If you can, you should do both email marketing as well as social media. The goal is to be where your audience is. So if some of them are on social media, it would be smart to spend some time there as well.
Enjoy,
