Social media has firmly cemented its place as a vital marketing tool and has evolved to be much more than just a platform for posting photos and sharing life updates. At the same time, email marketing has grown more important to marketers and has the highest return on investment of any channel.
Both email marketing and social media have their strengths and benefits, and marketers need to focus on how to make the two work together rather than prioritizing one over the other.
Email vs. Social Media
Social media platforms rely on email for certain functions, like welcome and confirmation emails and password resets. Traditionally, you need an email address to even register for a social media platform such as Twitter or Facebook.
There are more than 2.6 billion email users worldwide, almost twice the number of daily active Twitter and Facebook users combined. This presents an opportunity for marketers to increase traffic and revenue through a platform many users already have and are familiar with. In fact, email is almost 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter.
The biggest difference between sending an email versus a social post is that subscribers can only engage with your email if it makes it to their inbox, whereas you hope to send a tweet or post an update during an optimized window of time for maximum exposure. But even in the most cluttered inbox, the email itself has a longer shelf life than any instantaneous social post.
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