Email Marketing Vs Social Media: Who Is The Winner?

Is it worth investing in social media over email marketing? If you’re stuck between email marketing and social networking for your business, you are in the right place.

One improves brand recognition and the other is so multifaceted to the extent that it can reap profits while improving engagement.

Read on to compare and contrast the perks of electronic messages with social statistics so that you can pick the best fit. 

Make a comparison first between email marketing and social media

Did emails come before social media? Actually, it doesn’t matter whether which came first.

The real competition is between the performance of the two.

Take a look at the following to find out which out channel can help you acquire customers and convert them more effectively. 

Which One Has A Better Reach

Did you know over 21% of emails are opened within one hour of receiving it? Perhaps this is because emails are personalized and direct.

It offers advanced tools for direct targeting and segmentation so as to nurture strong relationships with your leads. 

Moreover, you can improve the efficiency of the content using free or paid inbox placement tools with messages to ensure it reaches the target audience.

Social posts, on the other hand, may get buried in the feed of your customers. 

Here are five proven statistics highlighting why email marketing offers better reach over social channels. 

• Email reaches over 85% targets while Facebook has an organic reach of 6%. 
• You can gain 50 to 100 more click rates than social channels with emails. 
• While 58% of email users check their inbox at the start of the day, only 14% of social networking users check their accounts. 
• The visibility of marketing emails is 5x better than Facebook on top of an impressive open rate of 20% to 30%. 
• Over 60% of consumers sign up for promotional emails, whereas only 20% of customers who follow brand profiles on social networks do so.

ROI

Why do over 59% of marketers say that email contributes the most to their ROI? This is mainly because the return of investment in email marketing averages near 4400%. Simply put, you can get up to $44 for every dollar spent on it. 

The median ROI for email marketing as per the Direct Marketing Association and Demand Metric reports is four times higher than social channels.

Email outperforms social media because it can offer maximum profits using limited resources. 

According to Ecommerce Quarterly, electronic mail converts more than any of the social media marketing channels.

While messages have an ideal conversion rate of 3.5%, social channels convert at 0.5%. This might be due to the ad-blockers used by 25% of online users.

Simply put, by using blocking tools to skip ads, the efficacy of highly-targeted social network ads declines drastically. 

Sales 

Most social network users follow their favorite brands to learn more about products.

However, a good majority of these users don’t want the brands to interact via direct messaging.

When it comes to promotional deals, discounts, and offers, the inbox is the first place that customers rummage.

In fact, over 44% of consumers use brand emails to review advertisements as opposed to 4% of Facebook users. 

Marketers can use advanced tools like email automation to decrease the sales cycle by 2%, save 30% of the time, and increase revenue by 17%, which is unavailable on social media. 

Truth be told, over 60% of customers make a purchase triggered by marketing emails, whereas only 12.5% of social network customers do so.

That’s not all. According to a McKinsey & Company report, email users spend up to 138% more on products than users who receive zero promotional emails. 

Verdict: Why Email Marketing Is Better Than Social Media 

On top of the aforementioned reasons, email marketing is quick and reliable too. It is used up to 85% for lead generation, 84% for sales, 78% for lead building, and 74% for retaining customers.

With 60% of marketers convinced that email marketing is superior to social media, it’s indispensable for SMEs, startups, and freelancers of all shapes and sizes. 

Find out the seven reasons that make email marketing a better investment tool than social channels from the list below. 

• Cost-Effective: Sending marketing content via email is 10x cheaper than using social media advertising via Facebook ads. 
• Brand Recognition & Awareness: Over 37% of marketers believe email offers better brand loyalty as opposed to 11% for social channels. 
• Always In Sync With The Customer: While you can skip checking social media messages, email relates urgency and over 91% of consumers check their emails every day. 
• Complete Control Over Your Contacts: Social network contacts cannot be exported or imported and it can change drastically as it’s based on the algorithm. However, emails do not change as you have total authority over the list forever. 
• Audience Engagement Rate: Over 77.6% of marketers in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region make use of email marketing for increasing customer engagement rate versus 61% that use social channels to do so.   
• Complements Website Traffic: Many marketers use email marketing with a focus on driving website traffic using tools like landing pages.
• Efficacy: Up to 47% of marketers believe emails are the best marketing medium, contrasted with 33% who support social media on top of 72% of customers that prefer emails for business communication.

Bottom Line

Social media is good for attracting new customers while email marketing converts and engages them.

The trick is to combine email marketing and social network strategies to improve brand loyalty, customer retention, website traffic, engagement, and conversions simultaneously.