Email Marketing Vs Social Media Marketing - What Is The Best Approach?

Online marketing is essential for businesses of all sizes as it allows companies to reach new customers, and ultimately, increase their revenue without setting aside unreasonably large marketing budgets. 

Apart from SEO and pay-per-click advertising as the go-to channels, there are also social media and email marketing. These provide the ability to nurture relationships with existing customers while also growing brand awareness with new prospects. 

But is one better than the other?

Join us as we explore email marketing vs social media marketing to help you decide which approach is right for you. 

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a technique where you create a list of email subscribers to send them regular marketing materials such as newsletters, promotions, or announcements. 

While at first glance it may seem like shooting in the dark, you don’t have to send emails to all subscribers. It’s actually recommended to divide your contact list and target specific segments of your audience. 

Noteworthy benefits of email marketing include:

• High conversion rates

This refers to the rate at which an audience engages with your marketing materials and converts into customers. If you’re looking to improve your overall revenue, email marketing is the way to go. 

• Positive ROI

Owing to its affordability, email marketing generally offers a positive ROI, regardless of the budget (especially when you consider the conversion rates). In addition, if you invest in email marketing software, you can accurately and easily assess ROI as you’re only focused on a single marketing channel. 

• Consumer confidence

Email has been around for quite some time. As such, customers (particularly older individuals) are more comfortable responding to marketing content in their inboxes than compared to social media.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is used primarily to market to followers on social media networks, as well as users yet unfamiliar with your brand.

You can either invest in paid ads on these platforms or generate useful content to earn views and grow your following. 

Here are the key benefits:

• More opportunities to start a conversation

Even though marketing emails have the potential to engage new customers, they are not as flexible as operating on social media - more so when it comes to directly communicating with users. 

Social networks provide great opportunities to reach out to users one-on-one and engage them in a public conversation via comments. This ultimately makes your brand seem more inviting and personal, which may eventually lead to better conversion rates.

• Boost brand awareness

Social media users can organically come across businesses while scrolling. This provides companies with a way to reach brand-new customers.

• Access to valuable data

When users engage with social media ads, you gain access to valuable data surrounding the engagement rate (comments, likes, and shares) that allows you to determine how entertaining your content is. That way, you can easily improve how you present your brand and grow your following exponentially. 

Email Marketing Vs Social Media - Key Differences

Here are some of the main differences between social media and email marketing:

1. Content guidelines

Not only will you have to adjust the content slightly when using both, but there are also various content policies that you need to be aware of. 

Social media has strict guidelines that companies must adhere to, while there are no such limitations with email marketing. 

2. Personalization options

You can personalize your email communications easily through text fields that automatically fill in the recipient’s names. This leads to better engagement and conversion rates.

In contrast, social media posts typically can’t be personalized as they’re made to appeal to broader audiences. 

3. Frequency

Social network users interact with content throughout the day, meaning you’re free to make posts frequently. Email is a completely different story and you should keep the number of messages you send to a minimum to avoid overwhelming your contacts. 

This is easy to achieve through proper scheduling. 

4. Segmentation potential

Despite the fact both marketing channels allow for segmentation, the methods of doing so are very different. 

With emails, you can use software to send specific emails to different accounts you placed in a single audience segment.

On the other hand, social media segmentation involves researching the ideal customer and their preferred platform. In addition, you have to learn which brands they buy from and sites they like to visit. Lastly, you can serve ads to the right audience by leveraging hashtags or keywords. 

Which Strategy Should You Choose?

Deciding on email marketing vs social media marketing can be tough because there’s no clear winner - it all depends on your needs. 

For instance, if your target audience is younger, you’re better off investing in social media ads than sending emails. 

You should also evaluate your strengths. Say you have a well-written blog where you continuously post valuable content. You can utilize email marketing to get more mileage out of the content you already produced.

In case you have a small team that can produce short-form videos, you should consider choosing social media as your primary marketing avenue. 

You may take on a hybrid approach as well. In this day and age, consumers expect businesses to be present on social media networks. So, even if you don’t want to invest in ads because you’re too busy using email marketing, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create pages on social media networks. 

The same goes for those who are already successful on social media. You stand to lose nothing by investing in email marketing as it’s already one of the most affordable marketing tools you can use in your overarching strategy.

What To Do If You Can’t Keep Up?

Running just one aspect of an effective marketing strategy is a challenging task in itself. There’s plenty of research and “manual labor” involved in both social media and email marketing, let alone paid ads and SEO. 

Understandably, you may have trouble keeping up with the workload, in which case, you should surrender the reins to professionals. 

Oamii is a full-service digital marketing agency serving companies of all sizes. We employ SEO experts, content writers, web and graphic designers, and PPC managers - all to ensure a comprehensive marketing strategy for our clients. 

Regardless of your budget or needs, Oamii can help you establish a clear roadmap to online greatness, which nowadays translates directly into real-world sales. 

Let us know how we can assist you - fill out our contact form to schedule a call.