Updated on August 25, 2020

Digital marketing is one of the most utilised methods of connecting and reaching out to prospects to identify consumer behaviour. From a business perspective, wouldn’t it be better to use both social media and emails for more effective results?

Social network connectivity is the new email newsletter. Since social media is where most of the follow-ups, special offers, and occasional advocacy to your friends occur, email newsletters are now bearing the weight to be more relevant in order to stand out to their competitors.

In fact, to be able to optimise the usage of social media and emails, it’s best to understand the pros, cons, and opportunities that both channels have, and how it can help you optimise your business’s potential.

Where The Target Market Is At?

There are many users on both platforms. Since 2019, there are more than 4.3 billion internet users and 80% of them have social media accounts. Overall, there are 3.8 billion email users and 3.4 billion social media users globally. As stated in the email marketing article, practically everyone from old to young has at least one email. However, social media is used differently across the demographics, such as 79% of 18-to-29-year-olds and another 79% of 30-to-49-year-olds use Facebook the most while 67% of 18-to-29-year-olds use Instagram the most. In other words, your audience is scattered across social media usage despite most (if not all) of them having emails.

Followers and Listings

When there is a big following on social media, it means that brands have to curate relevant posts that get their followers to keep coming back. Social media may seem like a great platform to post things, but it costs more than emails by a stretch. Information on social posts is regulated by algorithms such that popular posts come up first and the less popular ones are either buried at the bottom or are left never to be seen at all.

In comparison to that, emails have the capacity to retain information for longer periods of time. This means your audience can go back to refer to it or view it repeatedly. Moreover, your email lists allow you to contact your subscribers. After all, you can’t manipulate social media algorithms nor utilise pay-to-play conditions in emails. However, there is an issue on email deliverability but as long as the emails lists are clean and used accordingly, emails would work out well for you.

Which Is Bringing In The Money?

It’s no lie that emails bring in the highest ROI (return on investment) with an average of $42 for every dollar invested compared to every other platform. Unfortunately, ROI for social media cannot be tracked, which is why emails should be the main focus, and social media can be the support for marketing.

However, a survey of more than 74% of consumers reported that social media influences their shopping decisions. This is because people still want to do their research and want assurance from reviews before committing to buy. Leading to that, social media brings virality to the table where emails can’t trend. 

Thus, this shows that emails and social media can go hand-in-hand in marketing.

Opportunities when social media and email marketing unite

The first thing brands should do is to coordinate a strategy that operates social and email communication in a synergistic manner. Currently, there are companies whose email marketing is a separate department from social media, and they need to at least cooperate to eliminate the common conflicts and miscommunication that goes on today.

Another opportunity would be to utilise your email list to find new customers. Social media has a setting where you can find your target audience of similar habits or interests, which then can help you expand your connections. From there, post up relevant ads to encourage this audience group to click your page, like a post, or make a purchase.

Not just that, re-target your audience in your email marketing according to how they respond to your emails. For example,  you can re-target those audiences who did respond to your emails but didn’t make a purchase.

Last but not least would be getting people to join your email lists via social. If promoting your social media on emails encourages engagement, then turning social media audience to emails would build your lists.

Wrap-up

In a nutshell, digital marketing still needs effort and time to execute campaigns, but the optimal results can be observed when you use multiple channels to support each other. Email marketing and social media marketing may have their differences, but that is what makes both the most powerful marketing channels.

If you want to learn how to integrate them into your business marketing strategy, get on a 15 mins call with our lead Sales and Marketing specialist now.

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