7 magnificent reasons why social media shouldn't replace your Email marketing

1. Numbers

No, not how many users each medium has, that’s a ridiculous argument. I’m talking about how many emails you get a day compared to how many social media posts are in your feed.

An email has a much higher chance of been read than a social media post. How many emails do you delete without at least reading who its from, and then the subject line. Not many, if any. Now how many posts do you miss a day in social media feed?

2. Lifespan

The average Facebook post lifespan is 22 hours and 51 minutes compared to 2.8 hour lifespan of a tweet. That is a pretty small window for your social posts. Compared this to an EDM, where the first 24 hours generates the most traffic, but still generates traffic a month or two after they were sent.

3. Environment

As we have seen with Facebook ads compared to Google search ads, social media simply isn’t as effective as search with generating sales. A social media user is simply not in the buying frame of mind.

Emails are a business medium; when using email you are ready to action. Unless you’re a messy inboxer, you take action on every email that comes into your inbox. Whether you're deleting it, archiving it, unsubscribing, replying, forwarding or clicking through you are taking some sort of action with every piece of mail.

4. Flexibility

Your email marketing can be simply plain text or you can send a mini website to someone. Every A/B test you have run becomes part of your emails; you know what gets people to open your email, and click through to your website.

You can test every aspect of your email. How much can you test with a Facebook post?

How you post on social media can have a big impact see the Cause of a 5,650% Spike in Facebook Referrals.

5. Analytics

Email marketing has much better analytics. Whatever email marketing client you use, it has some pretty good built in analytics. Opens, clicks, unsubscribes and you can campaign tag every link so the data comes into Google analytics. Data is everything in digital marketing.

However I will conceed that it’s possible to measure the click through of a social media post.

6. Personalised

How much do you actually know about your fan on Facebook? Other than some demographic percentages you don’t know a great deal. You can’t personalise a message on social media like you can on an email. Using dynamic content you change every aspect of your email based on the user.

By the way, having ‘Hi *|FirstName|*’ doesn’t make it a personalised message.

7. Revenue

Ultimately it all boils down to revenue, doesn’t it. Reasons 1 to 6 are all why email marketing generates more revenue than social media. One of our clients only recently started sending EDMs. In the three months since, when compared to Facebook, their email marketing had generated 155% more revenue for the entire year with 97.5% less subscribers / fans.

I wouldn’t say Social media’s 15 minutes of fame is up, but it’s definitely time businesses stopped prioritising their social media to the detriment of their email marketing lists.