Think social media is the best way to reach your customers? Think again.
Although both have value when marketing your business to potential customers, email is the way to go. Why? Although research supports this, there are some common-sense reasons you may not have thought of before.
Social media wasn’t created to market. Just because someone give you a “like” doesn’t mean they want all of your new products, offers, or specials to show up in their newsfeed. It takes much less effort to scroll over marketing without a second thought than it takes to send your email forever into the cyberspace abyss. When a potential customer signs up for email, whether that be at their favorite store, or online, they know what is coming — offers, specials, and new products. THEY make the CHOICE to accept your marketing.
Social media gets clogged up. I myself have over 1,200 friends on Facebook, not including pages I’ve “liked”. Do I receive (and read) all 1,200 updates everyday? No. Your social media site marketing may not even show up in their newsfeed based on their recent comments, searches, likes, or how much time they have to scroll down the feed before they are bombarded with more updates. Email, on the other hand, pops up in an inbox and at least the person reads the subject line.
Social media is boring marketing. Especially if your want to showcase your company in creative ways. You just don’t have the flexibility with social media like you do with emails that can be customized in an infinite number of ways.
You can’t selectively market with Social Media. If your company caters to different subgroups, there is no way to target these groups in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or similar sites. Because you can’t segregate these groups, you can’t get reports on specific groups. Not cool. Of course, you can seamlessly do this with email.
Ever try to ask your followers on social media for their email address? We haven’t either. It’s much easier to ask people to become a fan of your business over email than it is to ask for their email over social media. Just a bonus benefit of using email.
Don’t get me wrong, social media has it’s place in marketing. Email addresses get deserted, whereas social media accounts are much more personal and take more effort to build, therefore are less likely to be abandoned.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and others are getting the hint though. Businesses want to use them for marketing because they are effective. Soon all of these will be able to reach friends of friends through sponsored posts. You just can’t do that with email.
So which do you use email or social media?
Both. Just know WHEN to use them. Know when to allocate more resources to social sites and when to allocate more resources to email. Know when to make email sign-up or social media icons more prominent on your site. How do you know?
Use common-sense.
Email definitely has more advantages. For now.