Comparing Email Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing

Introduction

Everybody does their marketing online now.

Ever since the smartphone revolution, social media has become an essential channel for marketing teams everywhere.

But what about email marketing? Ironically, email marketing has been around longer than social media marketing — even though it gets less attention.

As marketing consultants, we urge brands of all sizes to invest in as many marketing channels as possible.

But what if you only had to pick one or the other?

Which would be a better choice? Social media marketing or email marketing?

How do these channels compare?

Let’s take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of each channel, before we make a decision.

Social Media Marketing

In marketing, you want to be where your customers are — and everybody spends their spare time on social media.

Having a social media presence will help spread brand awareness and grow an audience.

This lets you foster a community to build interest in your products.

Sounds great right? Here’s the catch: everybody hates ads.

Specifically, everybody likes to consume content, but hate when they get disrupted with irrelevant advertising.

And that’s what separates good marketing from bad marketing on social media — how relevant your content is.

If you create quality, relevant content for your followers, you can easily get organic sales — even though it can be hard to measure.

Here are some do’s and don’ts for social media:

Do’s:

• create content that educates people
• help people solve problems without having to buy a product first
• create content that is fun, engaging, and relevant to your brand
• build a community
• show the human side of your brand

Don’ts:

• try to sell something in every post, video, or story
• create the same content over and over
• sound like you’re on LinkedIn (even on LinkedIn)

At the end of the day, social media is best used as a content marketing channel, not a direct marketing channel — that’s what email is for.

Strengths	Weaknesses
Build an audience Brand awareness Educational content Helps your brand feel human Can generate organic sales	Inconsistent sales (especially for smaller brands) Needs consistent, quality content Content needs to be relevant to your audience

Email Marketing

People don’t spend half as much time checking their emails than they do checking their social media.

That begs the question: what’s so great about email marketing? Why does it make up 30% of the average e-commerce store’s revenue?

Where social media is a great channel to reach new people, email marketing is a great way to retain past shoppers and nurture them into brand enthusiasts.

With a good opt-in strategy, people who visit your website from social media can turn into email subscribers. This is where you can use email marketing to convert regular visitors to first-time buyers.

The best part is that people who opt into your email list expect to receive marketing promotions from you.

As long as you’re not spamming your email list, you can expect to earn sales each time you send an email.

Anti-Spam Regulations

So what’s the downside?

The only disadvantages to email marketing is that it relies on growing your email list, regularly cleaning your list and practicing good sending habits.

Although this sounds simple, newbies are often surprised to find out that email marketing is a well-regulated industry.

There are lots of rules that email marketers need to follow, otherwise you will risk getting spam-filtered or even fined.

The good thing is that almost all email marketing apps like MailerLite have built-in features to help you navigate these regulations with little effort.

Strengths	Weaknesses
Consistent sales Retain customers Nurture brand enthusiasts Subscribers have consented to marketing promotions	Need to follow email regulations Completely depends on the quality of your email list Must practice regular list-hygiene

Conclusion

By now you should have noticed that email and social media marketing each serve different purposes.

In fact, they operate at different ends of your digital marketing funnel:

Social media helps your brand reach new people, and get them to visit your website. That’s where your email marketing can convert these visitors into customers, and then retain them through your email list.

These are two different marketing channels that work together to help your brand succeed.

Comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges.

So to answer the original question: neither of these channels are more important than the other.

If you plan on growing your brand, it won’t reach it’s full potential without both of these channels.

If you only had to invest in one or the other, you’re probably at the start-up stage of your business, and we would recommend that you start with social media marketing after you build a small email strategy.

Eventually you might find that managing both channels can prove to be very demanding, which is why many marketing agencies resell our white-label marketing services so that they can focus on delivering the best client experience.

Learn more →