- July 30, 2015
- 0
- Email This Post
- Print This Post
How to Make the Choice between Email Marketing & Social Marketing
Send or tweet?
With all the talk about reaching Inbox Zero to reign in a digital life, you might think email campaigns no longer have a place in integrated marketing. After all, if recipients are focused madly on keeping their inboxes empty, will your marketing message get through?
Perhaps you’ll get a better response rate taking your message to social media channels. If advertisers worldwide are willing to spend a projected $23.68 billion on paid media on social channels this year, as eMarketer estimates, there must be better value and conversation rates in social marketing, right?
Not so fast.
Before drawing that conclusion, it’s worth jumping into the fray and understanding the showdown happening between email marketing and social marketing. Both have places in your integrated marketing strategy, but how and when?
You might get some answers from the infographic HostPapa produced, published by TheHubComms. The guide is a simple, visual way to establish how to deploy each channel.
Benefits. Email is the preferred tool for business communications, but social networks offer visibility, page ranking and customer engagement.
Growth. Email has reigned for the past decade, but social media is catching up quickly. Forrester Research projects spending on social marketing will climb to US$17.34 billion in 2019, up from US$7.52 billion in 2014.
Usage. The use of mobile devices is so prevalent that the phenomenon has even created a medical condition for die-hard users: Text Neck. With so much online activity, you might be surprised to learn how netizens are spending their time online. Email is the No. 1 activity, with 94 percent of people reporting they spend most of their online time sending or reading emails.
Reach. HostPapa also established that they prefer to access commercial information through email rather than social media. Contrary to the hype surrounding social marketing, email has gained traction over the past six years. Thirty percent of the total time spent using email in 2011 was dedicated to commercial communications, a spike since 2005, when online users reported spending 17 percent of their total time in the commercial email zone.
Features. Using either channel requires more strategy that simply genning up copy and sending or posting it. You’ll want to compare critical features, including list management, segmentation, deliverability, message creation, autoresponder, reporting and analytics, content sharing and mobile friendliness. In most cases, email marketing delivers better return on features than social marketing, according to HostPapa.
When it comes to delivering and measuring results as well as overall effectiveness, email marketing is a better-integrated marketing tactic. Yet, as we’ve covered before, email marketing works when companies devote resources to content development, template design, list segmentation and other direct-marketing techniques.
To understand the complex world of email marketing better, head over to our library of content.
You’ll learn how to revive engagement with inactive subscribers, avoid the most-common email marketing mistakes and tips on improving pre-headers. And that’s something we all can agree to “like.”
