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10 Ways Email Marketing is Better Than Social Media

Social media presents a wealth of new opportunities for marketers. Many find it has a lot of value in their marketing mix. But when compared to email marketing, does social deliver?

Even with all the great options social marketing presents, email marketing still seems to have many advantages over social media.

Here’s a list of 10 ways email marketing is better than social media marketing:

1. Guaranteed Views
When you send an email to a valid address you know it’ll arrive in your recipients inbox and they’ll have to recognize the message. At worst they’ll delete it without an open, which still presents a branding opportunity. However, in social channels you never know if anyone is seeing your message. Studies have found that 71% of tweets are ignored and brands have limited ability to determine if their content is even showing up in the streams of their Facebook connections.

2. Longevity
Even though email does achieve most of its results within the first 24-48 hours, it can still reside in an inbox until someone has the time to taking action on the message. In social media, your followers can miss a post or tweet entirely, and the ones they see will only be available until their stream is filled with other content.

3. Environment
Email recipients go to their inbox expecting to receive messages from people and businesses from which they have provided consent. Social media channels can be cluttered with content, advertising, alerts/notices, and other things that compete for users attention. Because of this social users tend to scan and pick out content while email users move from message to message. Email is generally a better environment for getting recipients to recognize and pay attention to your marketing content.

4. No Message Length Limitations
By not having to limit a message to a set character length, email allows marketers to present a more comprehensive marketing offer, explain benefits, support it with additional information and provide a strong call to action. The length of the message is determined by the marketer and not the limitations of the channel.

5. More creativity
Email allows marketers to fully explore their creative side by incorporating text, graphics and in some cases, animation and video all in one message.

6. More Significant Relationship
Those that opt-in to email lists are raising their hand saying they want to receive your marketing content. In social media, those that subscribe, like or follow your brand may be doing so for reasons beyond marketing, such as the opportunity for engagement or to see what others are saying. And filling out an opt-in form is usually a more considered decision than a one-click “like” or “follow”.

7. Personalization
Email content can be personalized with data or content specific to the recipient. Messages can even be customized based on purchase behavior, previous activity or many other variables. Personalization in social media is non-existant. Until social publishing tools can provide an automated process for creating personalized content, email will continue to trump social marketing in the ability to create personalized marketing messages.

8. Segmentation
Providing targeted, relevant marketing content almost always guarantees better results. Being able to segment your email list and use that data to provide a more targeted communication is a huge advantage of email over social.

9. Tracking / Reporting
Email offers the ability to track renders (opens), clicks, forwards, conversions, bouncebacks and much more. The reporting that you receive from an email campaign can provide a very accurate picture as to how recipients received your message, whether or not they found it interesting, whether or not they took action and if they completed the action. From a marketing standpoint, email reporting is superior to the metrics you receive from most social channels.

10. Higher Chance of Conversion
If your goal is getting someone to take action on your message, the ability to create a visually compelling message with a full marketing offer that is personalized and targeted to the recipient and has a higher likelihood of being seen should almost always lead to a higher conversion rate. And for most campaigns, that’s the main objective.

What other ways do you find email to be a better marketing channel than social?  Does social have any advantages over email?

About the Author: Adam Holden-Bache is CEO at Mass Transmit,  and purveyor of Email Transmit and Approved Emailer!

Scott Hardigree
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1 Comment

  • by Jamie Northrup
    Posted July 11, 2011 11:01 am 0Likes

    I think they are both important, but if there was a doubt that email is still king, you’ve put it to rest.

    Thanks for sharing!

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