When it comes to digital marketing, professionals can choose from numerous solutions. Since so many people are using different social media channels, businesses have been focusing their marketing activities on this digital space lately. With the rise of social media, brands are devoting less effort to their email marketing strategy. However, with a well-designed email marketing campaign, you can achieve outstanding results cost-effectively if you know your audience's needs and behaviors.
This blog article will review the advantages and disadvantages of social media and email marketing. Moreover, we will discuss why both marketing techniques should be used together to get the most out of them.
What Is Email Marketing
Marketing by email is a direct marketing technique that lets you notify customers about product and service launches and updates. The advantage of this method is its permission-based nature since only those on your email list will receive your message. With the right email marketing strategy, your email subscribers will become customers, and this method will make it easier to retain them. Now, let’s see the pros and cons of email marketing.
Benefits of email marketing
High ROI and cost-efficiency
Email marketing is cost-effective and has a relatively high ROI. This makes email the ideal marketing solution for small businesses and start-ups on a tight budget looking to reach a high number of clients at a low cost. Send newsletters quickly with email marketing platforms. Many of them offer free or inexpensive plans that include email templates.
Audience segmentation and customized messages
You can create various client lists based on their profiles and send tailored messages to them. Your emails result in a higher conversion rate if your subscribers receive email content that interests them.
Easily measurable
Email marketing platforms and web analytics software help you track key metrics. Track how many people opened emails, clicked on links and unsubscribed from emails.
Opt-in nature
Your database contains people who provided their email addresses to you because they are open to your offers and messages. Still, you need to create email content that is not spammy and is targeted to a specific audience.
Build trust and retain customers
Develop an email marketing strategy that helps you build a good relationship between your business and your email subscribers. Its opt-in feature and content tailored to your client's tastes increase trust in your brand.
Weaknesses of email marketing
Getting email subscribers
You need to use several sources to find subscribers. This includes your website, offline events, and your social media channels.
Undelivered and unopened emails
Check your subscriber database regularly for faulty or deleted email addresses. People change and delete their email addresses, so update your list regularly.
Your email deemed as spam
Choose your wording smartly and don’t use spammy words like ‘best price’, ‘save money’ and ‘bargain’ or your message might end up in the spam folder. Follow email security best practices to avoid errors like "no DMARC record found" causing email deliverability issues.
Design and size issues
Consider using clear and simpler aesthetics instead of complex images and banners in your email content. Your email subscribers use diverse devices and OS, and you can lose potential customers if they can’t load your emails.
Skills and resources
To accomplish your goals in an email marketing campaign, you need to invest in copywriting. You can’t bombard your subscribers with sales offers all the time. For customized content, find the right tone, text, and design. If you or your team don’t have the skills, consider hiring a professional email copywriter using an AI recruiting software.
What Is Social Media Marketing
For many industries, it’s the number one platform to promote their content and communicate with their customers. Over the last decade, social media marketing became an essential part of brands’ marketing strategies. Businesses can grow brand recognition, their audience, and website traffic across multiple platforms. However, it doesn't hurt if they are also aware of the weaknesses of this marketing practice.
Pros of social media marketing
Understand your audience
You can get a better understanding of your market through social media channels. Research what your followers think about your brand and product manually or with the help of social media listening tools.
Increased brand awareness and traffic
Over 4 billion people use social media frequently and 76% have bought products they saw on a social media platform. You can easily introduce your business and products to a large audience and boost your website traffic if you post quality content.
Extended reach
Since so many people use social media, you’ll reach specific audiences and can find your target markets. Find out which social media is most popular among each age group in HypeAuditor's study.
Choose between organic or paid ads
This marketing strategy allows you to promote your products organically or through paid ads. Businesses of all sizes and types can benefit from this solution, no matter their budget.
Evaluate your social media and influencer marketing performance
Access key metrics and check how your social media campaigns perform. You may use each social media channel's analytics feature or use influencer marketing platforms, like HypeAuditor. Essential data will help you fine-tune your future campaigns and attain your marketing goals and better results.
Skip the manual work
Plan, and track your live influencer marketing campaigns using fully-automated tools. Get estimates for your campaign performance in advance and leave the final number crunching to us.
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Cons of social media marketing
You’re exposed to your competitors
Just as you can analyze every move and marketing activity of your competitors, they can also see what kind of campaign you are running. Be one step ahead of your competitors by constantly monitoring industry trends, tracking your audience’s reactions, and analyzing your competitors.
Negative opinions
Social media’s virality can turn into a nightmare and damage your reputation if people have negative opinions about your product. Luckily, you can instantly react and apologize for their unpleasant experience and update your audience about improvements.
Time-consuming
You need to create captivating or thought-provoking content frequently. This multiplies if you’re present on several channels. Of course, you can save some time by repurposing content across more channels.
Costly
If done wrong, social media marketing can cost you a lot of time and money. No matter if you choose paid or organic advertising, you can’t grow your followers and drive sales if you publish low-quality or irrelevant content or target the wrong audience.
Slow ROI
This marketing approach provides a high ROI, however not overnight. Social media marketing is a long-term investment and you have to build your marketing plan accordingly.
Why Integrate Social Media with Email Marketing?
Email and social media marketing can serve diverse marketing purposes and produce different results. With personalized emails, you can build a closer relationship with your customers, which enhances your conversion rates. However, social media is a better solution to introduce your brand to new audience demographics or reach many people.
You’d miss out if you didn’t incorporate both practices into your digital marketing strategy. Once you know the advantages and disadvantages of these two marketing techniques, you can offset one’s weaknesses with the other’s strengths. Email marketing and social media integration enable you to boost your marketing efforts and improve customer experience.
How to Combine Email Marketing with Social Media Marketing?
Let's explore 4 ways to integrate social media and email marketing to get the most out of both.
1. Grow your subscribers' list through social media
Do you experience an incline in your email list? Or is your social media audience growing rapidly? Consider increasing the number of your email subscribers through social channels. Offer something for your audience, like exclusive content, a free sample, or a discount for joining your email list. Make sure your posts and your related landing pages are consistent with your brand’s design.
So how to grow your email list with social media? Your post can include a link, but you can also publish it differently, depending on the platform. Below are some more tips on how to share a link on different social media channels:
Add a link to your sign-up form on your Instagram bio. As an alternative, insert it in your Instagram story and add a timer to urge users to join your newsletter.
TikTok
If you have a creator or business TikTok account, you can provide a link to your sign-up form on your TikTok bio.
Facebook lets you embed a sign-up form on your brand’s Facebook account. You can easily create a form with Google Forms, generate the embed code, and add it to your Facebook account with an app.
Pipedrive's sign-up button on their Facebook profile
YouTube
Add a clickable link to your YouTube video if your channel has a minimum of 1000 subscribers and over 4000 watch hours.
Stand out on Twitter and provide a link to your form on Twitter Cards.
2. Add social media icons to your emails
Social media and email marketing are the easiest to combine when you display social icons. It might not be obvious to your customers and subscribers that you are on various social media channels. Whenever you communicate with your clients via email, be sure to include social icon buttons. This gives people another way to contact you and helps your social media get more followers.
Through social media, people can learn more about your business values as they see the content you interact with. Your customers can engage with you directly and informally, giving the whole communication a more personal feel.
Where to put social media icons?
Businesses usually place them at the top or bottom of their emails. Of course, there are other ways to draw your subscribers' attention to your social media profiles. You can create specific emails displaying relevant Facebook and Instagram posts, or YouTube videos, or provide content from your feeds in your emails.
DJI always inserts social media profiles in their newsletters
3. Retarget your email subscribers with social media ads
Let’s say you created an email marketing campaign for your new webinar. You can monitor your email’s CTR through third-party software like Google Analytics. But what can you do if users don’t take any action after clicking? Follow them up on social media with retargeting campaigns.
Chances are your email subscribers are active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. So leverage these channels by maintaining brand awareness and piquing their interests. A multi-touchpoint strategy adds value to your message and lets you deliver it to the prospect in a more appealing way. Above all, it shows the customer that your business is everywhere.
Make use of your email subscribers’ data to reach them with specific content. Using social media ads, you can even retarget unsubscribed users and remain visible to them. In this way, you can grow your conversion rate while simultaneously lowering your CPA.
Profit from the knowledge you have about your subscribers and post tailored content to them. For this, email segmentation comes in handy, which you can do in several ways. Break down and retarget users by demographics, product demand, and activity.
Users could register for Weblow’s Keynote on Facebook and get reminded of the event on LinkedIn as well
4. Build a social media community
A good example of email marketing and social media integration is creating an exclusive group for your most devoted customers. Point out who can access the group and how. Subscribers who have recommended your newsletter to a friend, for example, can join.
Setting clear rules, like forbidding spamming and self-promotion, will ensure that your group’s content remains relevant. Further, you can maintain high-quality engagements and an authentic audience. The latter provides a great opportunity to include user-generated content and positive reviews in your next newsletter.
Semrush’s Facebook group for digital marketers
Here are some tips for attracting subscribers to your private group:
Share specific content such as videos, tutorials, and free webinars;
Host contents, provide sneak peeks, and offer discounts;
Engage in conversations and answer questions to enhance the customer experience;
Consider your followers’ suggestions and ideas and improve your products or services proportionately;
Promote your email newsletters and email digests to members.
A second option would be to invite all your subscribers to join your Facebook or LinkedIn community. An effective way to increase FOMO is to send them a teaser and include a timer.
Conclusion
The combination of email marketing and social media may not seem like an ideal digital marketing strategy from the outside. Despite this, you will achieve greater results by combining various marketing techniques and allowing them to interact with one another. Following these tips can help you increase your subscribers, reach a broader audience, and expose your content more widely. Get the best of both worlds by integrating social media with email marketing!
