Email Marketing vs Social Media: Which Will Make You More Money?

While I believe both Email and Social Media are fantastic to add to your overall marketing strategy, there is one channel that takes priority.

Let’s look at the benefits of both:

Email Marketing

• Your subscribers ask to receive it
• Inexpensive
• You can segment your list and choose who sees what.
• Excellent tracking: Easily identify hot leads based on open rate/click throughs, etc.
• Can be automated/scheduled

Social Media Marketing

• Build brand awareness
• Organic Social Marketing is Free
• Good for SEO
• Increased website traffic
• Can be scheduled
• Paid social has good analytics but the tracking is not as good as email. You can’t see who saw it or clicked.

Let’s Compare:

Effectiveness:

With 1 billion active users of Gmail, and 3 billion by 2020 (Statista, The Radicati Group, 2016), email technology is the fastest evolving mode of communication.

Despite the “pessimism,” emails get read! Open rates for email average 20% or more based on the industry. Compare this to the average Facebook Page which only gets 2% – 6.5% reach.

What does this mean? Your email will be opened by 20-25 of every 100 subscribers and an average of 4.19 will click through.  On Facebook, only 2-6.5 people will see your post and only .9% will click through per 100 followers.

$1 spent on email advertising can return an average of $38 according to the direct marketing association. (CampaignMonitor)

The conversion of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media and the average order value is 17% higher with email. (McKinsey)

Measurable:

One of the greatest benefits of email marketing is that you can track everything. From the moment you send the email, you can see how many people opened it, clicked on a certain link, forwarded it, and much more.

Organic social media is much harder to track since you can see your reach, clicks, etc. but you can’t see exactly which followers are seeing your content or clicking unless they engage (comment or share) your post.

Paid social ads do have some better tracking but again, you can’t drill down to the user level like you can with email.

The Best Email Marketing Management Systems:

There are way too many email marketing management systems to cover, but the top three my clients use are:

• MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools used by virtual assistants to build terrific email newsletter campaigns for their clients, guaranteed to get quick results. It is fast, responsive, easy to use and comes with a number of great features.
• ConvertKit is becoming more and more popular as a great email marketing service for bloggers. It offers affordable automation with a fairly intuitive user interface.
• Active Campaign is known for its marketing automation. With easy to create flow charts and action tagging, you can tailor your subscribers’ & clients’ messaging to increase conversion. It also includes a CRM with lead scoring so you’ll know exactly when to reach out to someone to close the deal.

If you’re not already using email marketing in your overall marketing strategy, I highly recommend you start! Check out my post showing you How to Grow Your Email List to Have Clients On Demand!

Or if you are looking for more personalized help schedule your free Strategy Session