Well, let’s be honest here. Social media is a prize for connecting people, sharing ideas, and gaining visibility. Now, let’s look at email marketing. The only thing we can do is send emails to those on our contact list. Doesn’t this obviously make social media the winner? You just have to wait patiently until the end of the blog to figure it out yourself.
In this blog, we will be covering things like email marketing vs. social media marketing in almost every way possible. We will also give our verdict at the end of the blog. But, we encourage you to decide what’s best for you from the information we provide.
Email Marketing And Social Media Marketing
Email marketing has seen a lot of years. Many giant companies started only with email marketing. Email marketing focuses on establishing and strengthening the business and the prospect/customer connection. At the same time, social media targets a larger audience on a more general scale. You do not insert the customers’ names in posts like email marketing.
Many marketers will agree that social media has become indispensable for a business. So has email marketing. Before the feud of social media vs. email marketing, the former channel was the only efficient way to communicate with potential clients.
You cannot easily compare the value it provides over social media. Email stands as the standard mode of communication, whereas social media is only a tool to increase a brand’s visibility. But, before we conclude, let’s take a look at a few things.
Email Marketing Vs Social Media Statistics
A. There are over 4.1 billion email users worldwide as of 2021. In comparison, Facebook had 2.8 billion users.
One can infer from the above statistics that the number of people using email is far higher than those using Facebook. Even when you sum up the number of users in Facebook and Twitter, it is still lesser than the users we have for email. Simply because email is a platform that people of every age use, assume that your target audience is over 50; they are more likely to have an email ID than an active social media presence.
B. Only 4% of consumers go to Facebook to check out a company’s promotions, whereas 44% of users check their email for promotional deals.
Social media can be an excellent platform for promoting your products. This statistic shows that almost half of the customers liked your promotional emails. Yet, most customers search for promotional offers from brands they already know. So, their go-to place to search for them is their email inbox.
C. Conversion rates obtained through email marketing are three times higher than those received through social media marketing.
Why? Most people still do not trust social media for making purchase decisions. And for good reasons. Over the years, social media has been the place for scam artists to advertise other products as their own. However, lesser scams are happening through email marketing. It is also easier for the users to identify legit company messages apart from fake ones. Hence, in this round of email marketing vs. social media, the former wins.
D. The organic reach of emails is four times higher than any social media channel.
Every marketer eventually understands nothing works better than organic marketing methods. Social media marketing vs. email ROI is incomparable because email marketing outperforms it in every way. Most people like your posts and scroll down instead of checking out what it is. Even if they visit your profile, it is rare for a potential customer to go to your website through your social media page.
However, links on emails directly redirect your audience towards your landing page. Getting your website the organic reach needs to rank higher in the search engines.
E. 70% of the millennial population do not feel comfortable engaging with companies on social media.
The topic of email marketing vs. social media marketing came about after the massive increase in the use of social media by youngsters. However, the millennials do not like it when brands interact with them on social media. You cannot simply drop a DM about your promotional offer.
Yet, they have a much higher tolerance towards receiving promotional emails. Simple because email stands as the formal communication between a brand and the client/customer.
From these email marketing vs. social media statistics, you must have presumed where this article is going towards. We might be leaning towards the fact that email marketing is better than social media. But, before you come to a verdict, let’s list some benefits of both platforms.
Benefits of Email Marketing Vs. Social Media
Email Marketing
- When comparing email and social media marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is that email is an owned channel. Social media channels are either paid or earned, whereas the ownership remains with the third party. In email marketing, you gain the full privilege of all the campaigns you do. You own your contact lists and send them direct mails.
- When you run an email marketing campaign, you can easily measure the exact reach and ROI that the campaign produced. On the other hand, you can only see the number of accounts reached and the number of people who interacted with your post on social media. There’s no way of knowing how many of them actually converted into paying customers. Having email marketing software makes it easy to measure ROI and every other metric efficiently.
- Email marketing is not drastically changing or dying any soon. Yes! That’s an advantage over social media channels. Many social media channels change their features and policies quite rapidly. Simply put, email is consistent. It is not going to stop functioning anytime soon.
Social Media Marketing
On the topic of email marketing vs. social media marketing, we have only discussed things that favor email marketing. Let’s talk about the benefits of social media marketing now.
- Irrespective of the platform you use, reaching a wider audience is always the aim of social media. And social media is undoubtedly an excellent tool to spread the word. It is a great tool to get your message out there.
- You can get your email contact list updated with your social media marketing. When done right, you can gather so many email IDs and expand your customer base.
- You can make your campaign go viral. Unlike most think, a viral campaign isn’t sudden. It is a combined result of several people working on it for months. The posts you share on social media platforms do not get restricted only to your followers. Almost anyone using the platform can see your posts when you make your posts public. In simple terms, you have the possibility of getting more exposure than you do in email marketing.
Now, what do you think about email marketing vs. social media marketing? Will email marketing eventually die out since social media has almost all the features? Let’s see our verdict.
Verdict on Email Marketing Vs. Social Media Marketing
Email and social media marketing have come a long way since their advent. Both have their respective advantages and disadvantages. Yet, not many things point towards email marketing losing to social media.
Social media has a lot of features when compared to email. They let you express your brand’s identity in a more relatable way. More people engage with your content. But, the engagement you receive may not possibly point towards an increase in ROI. You should not lose the vision of what you use the social platform for. Likes and comments are not robust metrics for success.
The success of a brand is when your marketing efforts yield measurable results, such as an increase in profits. Email marketing lets you do exactly that. That is the only medium where many users still trust messages from brands. So, the chance of email marketing losing to social media is very thin.
So, our verdict is that email marketing will never lose to social media marketing.
Conclusion
Email marketing vs. social media marketing is an exciting topic to discuss for marketers. But, most marketers would shut down the discussion almost instantly by saying that it’ll never happen. We just went the extra mile to prove that. However, you should also be open to the idea of social media getting equipped with more tools that benefit brands. It is an ever-evolving platform anyway!
