Social media vs email marketing… which is better?
It’s a subject guaranteed to polarize marketers, but there is a clear winner.
Let’s dive in…
Once upon a time, when I first started marketing online, we had websites.
And back then, if you wanted to keep in touch with people there were two main options.
- Get them on your email list and email them
- Get them to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed
Perhaps unsurprisingly, email was king back then.
(And not just because people didn’t really understand RSS feeds).
After all, email was generally used by people to keep in touch with friends and family.
So being able to drop an email into their inbox was like having a one-to-one audience.
And then along came Social Media.
It promised deeper connections, viral sharing and easy engagement.
And many were seduced away from the old ways by the ease in which a business could build a following of loyal fans.
Some businesses even ditched their websites entirely to run everything from their social media fanpage and/or group.
At the same time, the big email account providers like Google and Yahoo started to crack down on spam and unwanted email.
They started filtering email based on how their customers engaged with it, and marketers emails started disappearing into the junk and spam folders.
Or sometimes not being delivered at all.
This combination of factors caused many marketers to proclaim email was dead as they embraced social media as the new king.
And so it remained for a few years…. until something unexpected happened.
Unexpected, that is, to the marketers who had built their businesses on social media.
The social media companies changed the rules.
Engagement for social posts got throttled down.
Slowly at first, as they encouraged businesses to start paying for extra reach and engagement.
Then more aggressively, as they faced backlash from users fed up with promotional posts crowding out message from friends and family.
Today a business can barely reach a fraction of their audience without paying for it.
Meanwhile, email didn’t die. Far from it.
The marketers who stuck with it, got smarter.
They started to focus on RESPONSIVENESS over list size.
Carefully pruning away the segments of their audience who were no longer interested in what they had to say. Building smaller, more responsive lists.
And while the less than half of social media marketers saw a return on their investment, email became one of the most profitable marketing channels – returning $42 for every $1 spent – a 4,200% ROI.
You see…
Social media marketers forgot one important lesson.
When you play in someone else’s yard, you have to play by their rules.
And building their audience on social media cost them ownership of that audience.
Email marketers don’t rent their audience.
They own their email lists.
Social Media vs Email Marketing – The Winner
That’s why email marketing has always been king.
And it’s why businesses are increasingly encouraging their fans back to email.
And as long you backup your lists carefully, they can never be taken away.
ListLockr makes it simple for email marketers to keep their lists safely backed up.
It makes a fresh backup every single day, so you’ll always have the freshest data available if the worst happens.