Social media marketing and email marketing are two popular digital marketing strategies used by businesses to reach and engage with their target audience. While both can effectively be used for promotion, there also have their differences.
Social media marketing involves using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to promote products or services, engage with customers, and build brand awareness. This is a highly effective and proven way to reach a large audience quickly and build your brand.
On the other hand, email marketing involves sending targeted, personalized emails to a specific list of subscribers. This is an effective strategy to build relationships with customers, nurture leads, and drive sales.
These two fields have become effective ways by which you can widen your reach and connect with more prospects. In this article, we will share the key things you need to know about them, including how they differ and complement each other.
Benefits of Using Social Media Marketing
Here are some benefits of using social media marketing:
1. Increased Brand Recognition
With the number of social media users worldwide expected to increase to almost six billion in 2027, this is not an opportunity to pass by. Social media is one of the most effective ways to get your business to reach a wider audience and increase brand recognition.
2. Improved Customer Engagement
Social media provides every business with a platform to engage with their customers and receive feedback in real time. You can connect with your audience one-on-one by responding to their comments or DMs.
Most users are almost always on their phones, navigating their social apps. This makes it easier to see your messages and attend to them, compared to emails that they could easily ignore or see at a much later time.
This helps you build stronger relationships with customers and improve overall customer satisfaction, which will translate to more sales in the long run.
3. Cost-effective Advertising
Social media advertising is cost-effective when compared to traditional advertising that requires television, newspapers, or radio. With social media, you can create and run a campaign within a shorter time frame and this comes in handy, especially for small businesses with limited budgets.
4. Audience Targeting
Social media platforms provide advanced targeting options, allowing businesses to reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors.
According to Pew Research Center in 2021, 84% of US adults aged from 18 to 29 are active social media users. If your target audience is within that age range, you can use social media to your advantage.
The advertising tools on these social platforms make this easier, as you can specifically target a demographic and advertise to them. This makes your publicity more focused with a higher chance of seeing effective results.
Benefits of Using Email Marketing
While social media marketing can benefit your brand as mentioned above, email marketing is also not left out.
In an earlier article, we already pointed out the Top 7 Benefits of Email Marketing for SMEs but there’s more, especially concerning social media marketing. This includes:
1. Personalized
While social media lets you address your audience on a huge platform and most times, connect with them as a brand, email marketing is different. With emails, you can send a personalized message to a customer.
There are several email personalization tactics to employ, starting from including the [First Name] tag at every given opportunity. It might take some time for some of your audience to check their emails but once they do, chances are that they will take action if it is well crafted and personalized for them.
53% of marketers say ongoing, personalized communication with existing customers results in moderate to significant revenue impact. If you’re looking to build a strong and loyal customer base in the long run, email marketing comes in handy.
2. Targeted Audience Clusters
Email marketing helps you create several buyer personas you can sell to at the same time. This helps you segment your email list, such that you can target specific groups of people based on their interests, demographics, and other data points.
This results in intentional email marketing, as you will only be sending relevant emails to your customers that they would like to see. This increases your open and click rates and ultimately, makes them take action, which leads to sales.
3. Drives Sales
Email marketing is a powerful tool for driving sales. You can use it to promote new products, offer exclusive discounts, and remind customers of items they have left in their cart. All these won’t be possible with social media, as you can’t randomly pop into someone’s DM constantly without being seen as spammy.
With the right email marketing service provider and proper integration with other relevant apps, you can make the most of this. MailDrip, for example, helps you create drip emails and automate them to deliver at the right time.
This ensures that every email your customer gets points them to making an important decision – to BUY.
4. Scalable
Email marketing can be scaled up or down depending on your business needs. You don’t need to have a huge audience or fanbase to make progress or even drive sales.
As a small business owner, you can have only 100 email subscribers and drive massive sales. This wouldn’t have been possible with the same numbers in social media marketing, as the latter banks on numbers for the most part and requires lots of engagements.
Whether you have a small or large audience, email marketing can help you reach your goals.
How to Integrate Social Media and Email Marketing
Social media marketing and email marketing may have their differences but both work together towards a common goal – to get more leads and make them paying customers who stay loyal in the end.
Choosing one or the other isn’t always the final fix. For your business to thrive in this day, you need to learn to integrate both social media and emails and use them to your advantage.
The key thing here would be to learn how each can be used to promote your business and more importantly, what would be more beneficial for your business.
Some strategies to guide you in integrating both marketing tactics include:
- Include social media links in your email to encourage subscribers to follow your social accounts.
- Share snippets from your email on social media to encourage more people to sign up and get more personalized content.
- Promote your social media accounts on your email signup page.
- Share your lead magnets on social media to let your followers know what they’d be getting if they signed up.
Bottom Line
There is no yes or no to whether you should opt for social media marketing or email marketing. However, you can use both to your advantage and this is why we’ve created a marketing strategy template to guide you.
All you have to do is fill out the form below and get it in your inbox. You can also contact us if you need further assistance.
