Social media has undoubtedly been in the spotlight for the last couple of years. It’s time email marketing received its due praise. While it’s true that social media can accomplish things like reaching a broad audience and encouraging conversations with customers, email marketing offers its own list of benefits that social media will never be able to emulate.
- Guaranteed Exposure
Does your post make it on your fans’ news feed? With Facebook’s algorithm, only the pages deemed most popular or relevant will make it on the “worthy to be seen” list. Even if you do make it, your post will disappear from your fans newsfeed within hours. Email, on the other hand, always makes it to your subscribers’ inboxes (forget about bounces for now), giving you a better chance of grabbing your subscribers attention with a carefully crafted subject line. In addition, even unopened emails can remain in an inbox for days, with each new visit by the subscriber an opportunity to snag his attention.
- More Intimate
Email is an inherently more intimate venue than social media, simply because communications in your inbox are not broadcasted for all the world to see. For this reason, most people guard their email addresses more closely than their Twitter accounts. Once you’ve earned their trust enough to get them to subscribe, you can take advantage of that relationship with special offers and incentives.
- More Opportunities for Creativity
There’s only so much you can do in a tweet or a Facebook post. But with an email, you can combine graphics, copy, animation, and whatever else piques your interest to create a fabulous eye-catching message designed to engage the subscriber to take action.
- Easier to Track
Email allows you to track such vital information as open rates, bounces, unsubscribes, and click-throughs, helping you make key decisions about what’s working and what isn’t and how you can make your campaign better. It’s much harder to track user engagement on a Twitter feed.
- Ability to segment your audience
It’s tough to create a one-size-fits all message. And if you try, it will rarely perform as well as a message targeted specifically to certain types of people. With a Facebook post, you’ve got to reach as many people as you can with one message, while email allows you to segment and even personalize your messages, making the subscriber feel more valuable and more closely connected with your company.
The reality is that both social media and email have a specific marketing niche to fill, and neither can perform the function of the other. In order to make the most of your email campaigns, take advantage of eConnect Email’s list segmentation feature, tracking options, custom email templates, and dynamic email creation to deliver tantalizing emails that your subscribers can’t wait to open.