A sea of opportunity awaits the marketers, but it all depends on what medium they use to target approach and nurture leads. With social media marketing and email marketing being the two main sources for a marketer to boost business, it gets extremely difficult to choose just one.
Though many seem to believe that email marketing is dying. But email is like the origin of the marketing tree. Paul Buchheit, a founder of FriendFeed once said that “Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all!” This seems to be quite comforting in a dark way!
With this, we take you on a heavenly tour of both these marketing sharks that work remarkably well solely and even as a team.
Social Media Marketing – Connects Instantly!
According to various statistical studies, 78% of the U.S. population now has at least one social networking profile; while more than half use two or more social networks. The number of worldwide social media users is projected to grow from 2.1 billion in 2016 to 2.5 billion by 2018. That’s a huge number. With a majority of people and brands now on social networks, it’s not a task to approach and make your brand visible to a larger audience.
Email Marketing – Bonds Instantly!
Email marketing stands at 1.47 million emails sent per month, US companies send more emails than the global average of 1.38 million; MarketingLand study. Email marketing was thought to be dead with the emergence of social media marketing but email is still standing strong.
Source: Adestra
2015 MarketingSherpa report, states that 72% of consumers say email is their favored channel of communication with companies they do business with. 61% say they like to receive promotional emails weekly and 28% want them even more frequently.
Email Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing – Pros & Cons
Email Marketing Pros:
- According to a detailed study by ‘The Radicati Group’, there are 3 times more email accounts than there are Facebook and Twitter accounts combined.
- Email marketing is more active in acquiring new leads compared to social media.
- 89% of marketers say that email is their primary channel for lead generation.
- Email is the preferred communication channel for communicating with brands and companies.
- It provides a huge scope of personalized communication using latest technologies.
- Double Opt-in in email marketing makes it consensual and credible.
- ExactTarget shows figures of about 91% of consumers who check their emails at least once per day, which makes emails one of the primary functions for which smartphones are used for.
Social Media Marketing Pros:
- It creates an immediate buzz across a wide platform in a short span of time.
- It can have a larger fan and follower base on a global level. Thus giving a chance to expand networking across a wide range of audience/user base.
- Companies develop competitive intelligence. This can be socially driven as it can capture conversations while taking care of your brand and its competition.
- Promoting content using social platform boosts traffic and provides positive signals to search engines thus leading them back to the website.
- Content on social media is often shared and this can increase views and improve brand image through visibility.
Email Marketing Cons:
- There are chances of your email getting spammed.
- Renderability in emails can affect the way your email is displayed on the screen.
- Not having relevant and catchy content for interaction can affect and take email open and click-through rates downhill.
Social Media Marketing Cons:
- Social media isn’t as reliable as email.
- It is also constantly under the threat radar of viruses and hacking.
- In the social marketing world, just as good news can go viral so can bad, and this can, in turn, do your business irreparable harm.
- A lot of time and effort needs to be invested in maintaining an interactive social media presence. It is sometimes difficult to devote the needed resources to social media.
- There is no definite method to measure the ROI in social media.
Wrapping up
In the end, Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing are two most frequently used and sought-after marketing methods. Using both simultaneously can reap greater and stronger sprouts. Using both these methods can cross promote campaigns and get better results. According to Nonprofit Hub, emails with social sharing buttons increase CTR by 150% getting you the best of both worlds. So go ahead exploit both these methods to gain the maximum benefits out of each for your business.