Why Email Marketing Beats Social Media for Small Businesses

Small business owners typically hear advice on making the most of social media for marketing purposes. After all, social media helps you reach large audiences and interact easily with potential clients. However, focusing on social media might mean you end up neglecting to make use of an even more effective marketing tool that’s right at your fingertips. Email marketing provides certain advantages over social media for small businesses that really shouldn’t be overlooked.

Impressive ROI

Email marketing provides your company with a much higher chance of seeing a significant Return on Investment (ROI). According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing campaigns resulted in an ROI of 4,300 percent, earning businesses roughly $42 for each dollar spent. Compare that with the organic reach of Facebook content for marketing, which came in at a low 6 percent, representing a steady decline over the past couple of years.

Higher Number of High-Value Customers

Focusing your marketing efforts on email campaigns rather than social media is likely to bring you more business. Predictive analytics platform Custora released a report showing that customer acquisition through email marketing has quadrupled, while the value of customer acquisition via Twitter was 23 percent lower than average. In other words, email marketing helps you gain new customers at a higher rate, and those customers typically turn out to be high-value ones that are more profitable for your company than those acquired through social media.

Personalized Messages

While social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, give you a convenient way to let customers know about new products and special offers, you’re limited to how long your posts and Tweets can be. You’re also posting to the public in general, so your messages on these sites have to appeal to a broad audience. With email marketing, you’re sending messages to customers who have opted in to receive mail from you. There are no limits on how long your content is, and you have the option to narrow your focus and give your messages a personalized touch to appeal more to these customers.

Guaranteed Delivery

When you send emails to customers on your email marketing lists, these messages are guaranteed to land in their inbox. With social media, you have to hope that potential customers will visit your site, read your posts and decide to follow you. Even if you include links to social media sites on your company’s website, there are no guarantees that interested customers will click on them. Email marketing takes the guesswork out of this by directly delivering messages to potential and repeat customers.

Better Tracking Ability

Email marketing provides an easy way for you to keep track of conversions and user engagement. You can track the following:

• Number of customers who opened your email messages
• Number of customers who clicked on links in your messages
• Specific links that were clicked on
• Number of customers who have unsubscribed

With this information, you can make improvements to your email marketing campaigns to make them more effective and ensure more sales for your business.