Social Media vs Email Marketing.
I may be a strong fan of social media, but I am not daft enough to think with blinkers and throw out other forms of marketing and certainly not looking to drop email marketing any time soon, but there is a debate regarding Social Media vs Email Marketing so let’s take a quick look at both to compare:
Both healthy debates and furious defensive ones take place regarding which of the two is ‘king‘, there’s the thoughts from the tried and tested point of view as well as the new to the scene and viral thinking crew… There is no real answer though to be honest and both lend themselves fantastically well, when applied correctly, in delivering real time results and ROI.
Both forms of marketing are still very much ‘modern’ and accepted it the way they reach out to our ‘target audiences’ and I would say that most modern day internet accessing devices accommodate both email and social media so there is no edge for either here.
Social Media is growing strongly and showing no signs of breaking down which is the case for Email Marketing as those thinking that sending an email will finally become ‘dead’ continuously are quietened by the fact email marketing goes from strength to strength each year. Maybe Email Marketing has the edge here simply because it has been around for longer and more tried and tested…
What about real time, the ability to follow those you are looking to target at both their work and leisure times, how do they compare? I would say that social media stands tall in the way it has the ability to keep audiences engaged and upto date with a company’s latest news at any time, email marketing is fine to target audiences at a set time only and would not be able to involve itself in people’s everyday movements unlike what social media can.
The ability to reach the networks of the networks that follow / are subscribed to you. Again, social media will have it’s nose in front again as the ability to like, share, retweet and comment enables a business message sent out on the varied platforms to be read not only by direct followers, but their followers also which gives us the viral marketing aspect of social media. An email is read, unlikely to be forwarded on unless prompted to do so and has a value to the end user to do so.
Subscribers vs Followers/Members/Likes etc. I would say we are fairly equal here as the value of an audience on social media is becoming more and more recognised and seen as on par with having subscribers. If you have 15,000 followers on Twitter, a clever tweet delivered at the optimum time could give the same rate of click throughs and engagement as an email sent to 15,000 subscribers. Open rate vs engagement likely to be similar though possibly Email Marketing would lay claim to winning this as it is harder to obtain subscribers than followers ensuring that engagement is stronger with email marketing.
I would say that even though the above shows that both forms of marketing are strong for business, a clever business would recognise the value and benefits of both and adopt them in current and future marketing campaigns.
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