If you don't have email marketing sussed, you are missing out. With the highest ROI of all marketing channels, it is simply too good to neglect! Here are 6 benefits of email marketing over social media posting:
1. You can personalise the experience
This is the best one for us. With social media, most of your posts are likely to be one of two types: either product-based or engagement-inviting. By necessity, they will also be generic for your audience.
You should design your CRM programme in a customer-centric way. Visualise the customer journey. Think about what message your customers will want to hear and when. An absolute must for making this work is to segment your database. Even the simplest of segmentation (for example whether someone is a prospect or an existing customer) will make a big difference. It’s an absolute no-brainer that customer-centric organisations are more likely to succeed. Yet it is not always so easy to put it into practice.
2. Engagement is deeper
There are a few factors that mean email achieves a greater engagement than social. First, the length of the message means you can get more information across. Second, personalising your message means the content is more likely to resonate. Also, people tend to have a different mindset when they open an email. You are not competing with other bright images which a tempting for your customer to scroll onto.
Make your opening sentences and imagery the most engaging possible. Get your reader to stay with your message and the engagement opportunity is superior to other marketing channels.
3. You can better control who sees what when
With social media, you put your post live but have little control over the number of views. Map your customer journey; put them at the centre of all of your emails. This means you can provide each reader with a timely, relevant, and valuable message.
4. You can tie up your other marketing together
You put a lot of effort into your marketing, and you have a load of great content out there. You can use your email newsletters to showcase all this great work! The benefits of this are to make each piece of activity work even harder, getting them in front of as many of your customers as possible. It also positions your company as credible. The more layers to your messaging on your content pillars the more likely customers will consider you an expert in your field.
5. Drive traffic to your website (and social platforms)
Although it is possible to put your website link on your social profiles and posts it is difficult to make the customer journey easy. Why? Because the social platforms want to keep their visitors there, they don’t want you driving traffic away! With email, on the other hand, you can make the journey seamless; give your readers hints about your useful content and then provide a link to find out more. Drive traffic to specific parts of your website or custom-built landing pages.
Top tip: Make sure your customer journey is well thought-through and test it before you push your email live.
6. You own the data
Rather than relying on anonymous cookie data to track your success, with email, you can see exactly what the recipient has done. You can see that they opened your email. Perhaps they opened it many times? You can see where they clicked, and you can use that insight about them in the future. Each click gives some insight into what interests your customer.
This clarity of tracking also means you can conduct scientific testing. This is another of our favourite benefits of emails. You can take a section of your recipient list and send them something slightly different to learn what works best.
But wait… are we saying social is all bad? Absolutely not!
Social Media is a great tool to work hand in hand with your Email marketing activity.
