The ultimate Internet marketing debate has been going on since the existence of Myspace, which form of marketing is more superior,
Email marketing or social media marketing?
This is no different than arguing which is better, old or new? Some say “old is gold,” but others will counter-argue, “old is not always gold, sometimes new is what to do.”
This reminds me of a video I recently watched from a content creator named Dhar Mann.
Long story short, it was about an interior design company figuring out how to better market themselves. They had a long dry spell of inbound sales calls, their rent was 30 days past due that they couldn’t afford to pay, and if they didn’t come up with the money to pay it, they would have to close down. The company’s back was literally against the wall.
One of the marketing executives, Barb, came up with a new old-fashioned idea to rent a whole page newspaper ad space, but the head of the company shot the idea down and thought it was time to try something new. So she hired a young popular TikTok user, Allison Day, to help out.
She wanted to promote the company with a TikTok video, but the marketing executive ridiculed the idea and thought Allison had no idea what she was doing simply because she was young and didn’t have decades of marketing experience under her belt.
The head of the company made a compromise to try Allison’s idea first, and if it didn’t work, they would go with Barb’s idea. So Allison published the video on TikTok, and all of a sudden, multiple phone calls started coming in.
I know what you might be thinking.
That wasn’t exactly an email marketing vs social media marketing story, but you get the point. It’s a story of old vs new.
So how do we determine which one is better?
When it comes to email marketing, there are so many marketing experts going around the Internet and publishing articles saying that “email is dead.”
On the other hand, the world of social media has been getting a lot more crazy too. I’ve personally heard stories of people getting screwed over by social media.
For example,
Earlier 2019, I met another fellow copywriter who introduced me to a creatives network called GFTD.
Usually, the members would meet every Monday evening at a bar in New York City.
But during the COVID pandemic, we have group Zoom calls where people from all over the world join in.
There was one day where we were discussing how artists can get more eyes on their work through Instagram.
One woman, who’s an artist (or graphic illustrator, I don’t exactly remember), shared her experience on Instagram with everyone.
Basically, she spent countless hours building up her profile page to get thousands of followers and over one thousand visitors per week.
Then one day, Instagram decided to change their algorithm (again).
Did that affect her Instagram presence?
You bet it did.
Nowadays, she no longer gets over a thousand visitors a week. It dropped down to only 200 a week.
Was she frustrated?
Of course.
Can she do anything about it?
Well, yes. If she still wants to showcase her work to the Instagram community, she has no choice but to play by their rules and spend time rebuilding her traffic until Instagram changes their algorithm again. At that point, it just becomes a vicious cycle.
So with that being said, let’s dive deep into email marketing and social media marketing, and come up with a verdict once and for all.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is exactly what it sounds like, sending (Mainly) sales emails to a group of people that have voluntarily signed up to receive your newsletters.
According to trusty ol’ Wikipedia, the first email marketing campaign was sent in 1978, back when the Internet was known as the ARPANET, by a person named Gary Thuerk. He sent 400 emails and claimed to have made $13 million. But back then, people sent emails that would be considered as spam today. It used to be a channel where businesses can make blatant sales offers to their potential customers, but now it’s more about building relationships with them.
So even though it’s one of the oldest forms of marketing, it has evolved so much over time making it one of the most effective ways of marketing. As of the date I’m writing this, email marketing continues to deliver high return on investment, $42 gained for every $1 you spend.
What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is also exactly what it sounds like. It’s the act of consistently creating and publishing content on one or multiple social media platforms to promote your business, your products and services.
While some businesses do sell their products and services directly, the main goal (In my eyes) is to build brand awareness while building relationships with your audience, just like how you would in email marketing.
The one big difference is that when it comes to social media marketing, you can really take advantage of visual content, especially on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, where it’s heavily centered around pictures and videos. So you’re able to share certain things about your business in a much more effective way than you would be able to through email.
So now that you’re familiar with both marketing channels, let’s analyze the pros and cons of each.
Email Marketing
Pros
1. Email Is Direct
Email is very personal and is one of the easiest (And fastest) ways to contact your potential customers. You can write emails that are tailored to their personal interests, and that helps build your relationships with them.
2. Higher Impressions
Your readers are more likely to see your emails than to see your social media posts. According to Forrester, an American market research company, 90% of emails get delivered to your reader’s inbox, whereas only 2% of them see your posts on their social media news feed.
Yes, I’m especially talking about the people on Twitter or Instagram who follow thousands, or tens of thousands of people’s content. What do you think the chances are of them seeing your social media content?
3. Your Email List is an Asset You Truly Own
When people willingly add their email addresses to your list, that information is rightfully yours to keep. And you can contact those people whenever and (For the most part) however you want. In other words, you have more control.
4. It’s Completely Free to Start
A lot of email marketing softwares offer free plans for those who are just starting off. The way their pricing model works is that the cost increases based on how many subscribers you have in your database.
To show you what I mean, here’s a screenshot of Mailerlite’s pricing model:
I highly suggest using Mailerlite as your first email marketing software. It’s very easy to use, provides a generous free plan, and has inexpensive pricing as you grow your email list. But if you’re looking for more options, check out my Email Marketing Strategy blog post.
Moving on.
5. It Can Be As Personalized As You Like
Most, if not all, email marketing softwares have a segmentation feature, which allows you to categorize your subscribers into different groups based on their actions and behaviors. And then what you can do is send emails to a specific group. In other words, you can send out personalized emails which means your subscribers are more likely to take action (AKA buy from you).
Cons
1. Risk of Being Thrown Into Spam
Nowadays, spam filters are getting a lot stricter and a lot smarter. There are hundreds of words they look out for in your emails. Hubspot actually made a huge list of spam words that you should avoid using in your emails, just click the hyperlink to check it out.
2. Email Is Extremely Abundant
People receive hundreds of emails everyday, and depending on how well they manage their inboxes, they may not even get to open your emails at all. That’s why generally the email open rates float around 10 to 20%. That’s why it’s more important than ever to make your emails stand out, not necessarily graphics-wise because graphics heavy emails may be mistaken for spam emails too, but in terms of unique, engaging content. Not only that, but it’s important to be consistent with your emailing as well.
3. It May Take Time Before You See Results
Whenever you hear people make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars from a single email, it’s not really because the email they wrote magically persuaded people to give their money. What they don’t share is how much work they put into building the relationship with their customers first, and that takes a lot of time.
There’s an e-commerce email copywriter and agency owner I follow and he once shared that he had a customer that stayed on his email list and didn’t buy from him until four years later. That, in my opinion, is a more realistic situation and is what you should expect when you start email marketing too. So don’t get discouraged when you see no results at first. If you stay consistent and properly build the relationship with your subscribers, the results will eventually come.
Let’s stop here, I think we’ve covered everything about email marketing. With that said, let’s revisit social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing
Pros
1. Easy Exposure
With social media, it’s relatively easy to get your content and your business in front of a new audience, especially on platforms like Instagram where you can take advantage of the hashtag system, and I heard on the social media grapevine that organic traffic on TikTok is extremely powerful, at least at the time I’m writing this.
2. Instant Interaction
People are always active on social media, so when they see your content, they react to it however they want to, whether it be liking, commenting, or following your content. Not only do you get instant feedback on your content, but you can also reach out to them, get to know them more, and get them more involved with your business.
3. Free Quick Traffic
Building your social media platforms doesn’t have to cost any money. You don’t necessarily need to throw money into sponsored ads, and you certainly don’t need fancy graphic design software to create attractive images. You can always use free tools like Canva, which is my personal favorite.
Plus, you can get free traffic as soon as tomorrow. Someone can see your content and if they really like it, they’ll most likely check out your website. The results can come much faster than other organic marketing efforts like search engine optimization.
4. It’s a Good Relationship Building Tool
Unlike email marketing, you have the ability to interact with your audience in a more involved fashion like going live on Facebook or Instagram, posting stories, and sharing videos. It always feels more personal when your audience sees your faces and hears you talk, it feels way more personal than just reading text from you.
5. Your Content Can Go Viral
People love to share content on social media, especially other people’s content. Although it’s rare, your content may go viral, as in, it gets millions of hits within 24 hours. That’s a massive amount of exposure for your business and can potentially be game-changing.
Cons
1. It Can Be Difficult to Maintain
Social media platforms are designed to keep you on it for as long as possible, whether you’re just consuming content or creating content. If you want to stay relevant on social media, you have no choice but to constantly post new content while satisfying their ever-changing algorithms. Like they say about muscle, use it or else you’ll lose it. If you’re good at creating content, then that may not be an issue. But it can still take up a considerable amount of your time not only from creating and posting content, but also from interacting with your audience, which ultimately can lead to burnout.
2. Oversaturation
Older platforms like Facebook and Twitter that were once great sources of traffic are getting more and more crowded every year, which means it’s a lot more difficult to attract quality traffic. And with the algorithm changes, it may eventually get to the point where just posting consistently may not be enough, and if you want to get better results, you may be forced to throw some money into paid traffic.
3. You’re Under the Control of the Platform
As I mentioned before, the thing that ultimately controls if your content is going to be seen is the algorithm. You have no choice but to be under the mercy of the social media algorithms and play by their rules. That means one day you could be getting tens of thousands of profile visitors per day on Instagram, and the next day it’ll drop down to one thousand visitors per day. If you don’t believe me, scroll back up to the story of the artist’s Instagram experience.
Verdict
Now that we examined both marketing channels, let’s go back to the million dollar question, which one is better, email or social media?
Well unfortunately, there’s no easy way. Like everything in life, they both have their pros and cons, so it’s hard to determine that one form of marketing is truly better than the other. Both channels can produce amazing results for your business, it really comes down to taking the time to learn how to use them and being consistent.
If you want my biased opinion, I’d say email is superior simply because I chose to be an email copywriter, not a social media specialist.
But if you want my real opinion, why not just use both?
You can actually create a funnel system and it can be as simple as this:
1. Use social media to introduce your business to new potential customers.
2. Funnel them into your email list by promoting, ideally, a lead magnet.
3. Consistently email them to build the relationship, which will basically “condition” them to buy your products and services down the line.
If you want to read about this funnel system in more detail, check out the sample chapters of How to Become an Email Titan.
It goes into the basic fundamentals of building your own email marketing system and then goes into great detail on how to write engaging sales emails.
Just click the link below to get your free copy.