In digital marketing or online marketing, social media marketing (SMM) and Email marketing both plays an important role while doing an online business. According to Porch Group Media, 99% of consumers check their Email daily and 73% of marketers believe that social media marketing is somewhat very effective for business.

The comparison between social media or email marketing is more relevant than ever. But the question is, which strategy holds the key to the business’ success?

In this article, we will learn step by step the advantages and disadvantages of email and social media marketing for the marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is one of the popular and effective type of digital marketing. It is a marketing method in which you can list all the email subscribers and send them email regularly about your business announcements, promotions, bonuses and newsletters. Email marketing is a gateway for you to promote your product and services, build relationships, inspire customer loyalty and gain valuable feedback from the customers. The tricky way to write an email for a business is to build an email list, create engaging email marketing content, targeting your audience and craft the subject line and also apply the best strategy. Emails are an easy communication to send as daily basis to launch a new product or services, revamping your site, opening a new store or hosting an event. You will notify confirmation mail; thank you note and any notifications with regards to the email.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is an act of promoting content into the social media channels including Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. Content should be catchy and high quality to boost the lead generations and increase brand awareness. One of the most benefits social media has that 3.2 billion people use social media around the globe. Social channels businesses directly to engage with the customers, thus build a strong brand loyalty. Video content or any e-commerce site are channel specific perks of social media marketing. For instance, technology company Apple used social media to promote their I-phone during “National Coffee Day”-a social media inspired holiday.

The key to social media success is creating shareable content. Marketers could post directly on their profile, and they could add social media sharing buttons to share their content with their friends and family. One of the biggest advantages of SMM is- it’s accessible, affordable for small business. SMM channels are very important for its very effective strategy like two-way communication between your brand and your customers. Users can like your posts, leave a comment and engage with your content. Some platforms even allow some customers regarding their products and give feedback also. In this way, it will generate more leads as well and also increase visibility and reach to the target audience.

Advantages of Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing

• Cost-Effective: The cost of email marketing can be much lower than any other marketing. There are no advertising fees, prints and media costs.
• Permission-Based: Emails need some permission to receive email communications from you. If they get the permission, then they can show their interest with the customers for their business.
• Getting Customer Feedback: Email Marketing enables to get the good feedback from the customers. If they satisfy of your product, they will write good feedback which will bring a good positive vibe to your business.
• Shareable: Email marketing can be used to reach large audience or lower targeted list.
• Measurable: Email marketing success rate can be measured by tracking bounced emails, open rates and click through rates.
• Benchmark: You can compare your results against other industry. There are many free email marketing benchmarking reports available.
• Test before you send: A/B testing of subject lines, click through rates, personalization, email copy, images and messages, ensure you that your email copy is very effective it can be before you send.
• Environment-friendly: Email marketing is environment friendly as it is direct marketing by postal, as nothing is printed.
• Drive traffic to your website: Email marketing brings good traffic to your website if the mail is written with good and relevant content.
• Improve Brand Recognition: Email marketing brings good brand recognition for a website, product or services.

Disadvantages

• Spam Issues: Many users use spam folders or tools to avoid getting any email in email marketing.
• Undelivered Emails: The problem of email marketing is some emails that you send, will not deliver on time and it will show as undelivered.
• Unopened Emails: Email marketing has an issue with unopened emails. As a result, ROI can be reduced for your business.
• Need large audience to convert significant sales: Email marketing needs a large audience for a business. If you need a good sale, marketing rate should be increased. In this case, marketing needs a larger audience.
• Design Issues of different devices: Email lists have many different devices like I-Phone, Androids etc. If you made an email campaign with a certain design, it would show different users in different devices.

Advantages of SMM

The power of social media is undeniable. It can share content easily, engage in real time and track performance through social media analytics makes it an essential marketing plan.

• Cost-Effective Marketing: Compared to other marketing, social media marketing is inexpensive. Creating a social media account is free and running a social media ad is more affordable than other media.
• Increased Brand-Awareness: Social media marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Youtube brings brand visibility. While doing online marketing, it is very important to reach global audience if you create social media profile.
• Target Advertising: Social media marketing provides business with targeting options. You can segregate audiences by demographics, behavior, interests, and more, make sure your content reaches to the right people.
• Real time performance Tracking: social media provides actual analytics performance as the business can track the real or organic content and ads in real time.
• Building Community: Brands will bring a strong building and make the customers trust on their online business. Sharing stories and user generated content, interacting with followers will bring a long-term relationship.

Disadvantages

• Time-Consuming: In SMM, time is required to manage account, create content and engage with users. Maintain an active social media presence is very important to keep a user ready to promote for their business.
• Negative Publicity: Although SMM builds a brand, it will create negative feedback quickly. Bad reviews, negative comments, and any controversies can be shared instantly, damaging the brand’s reputation.
• Low ROI: One of the main negative points of social media marketing is lowest ROI. If you do not follow or engage with your friends or followers, the followers will start decreasing. If you will not engage with your followers or friends, how will your business grow? It will affect your ROI system.
• Need to stay Engaged and Active: social media is a platform of lot of algorithms. If you are active and stay engaged with your followers, your business will grow very fast. If you are not that much up to date on social media, you are going to fall behind the others.
• Difficult to Measure: SMM is a vast platform. The main issue is difficult to measure its algorithms. If your engagement and interactions just can’t over the place, you can’t be sure about the brand awareness strategies.
• Security and Privacy Policy Issues: One of the biggest negative things is security and privacy policy related issues. If you create a profile in social media, you have to share all the personal as well as public information for your business policy. So, it won’t be 100% safe as I believe.
• Do not work for all Group of People: You cannot target all the people of the group because in social media needs target audience for their business goal. In this case, SMM needs some particular group for target audience for particular age groups. So, do more research to reach the target audience.

Conclusion

So, to conclude this article, you can say both Email marketing and social media marketing (SMM) has same impact on online business. The important key takeaway of this article is,

1. Build your email list through social media
2. Share Email content on social media
3. Connect your email and social media campaigns
4. Encourage social media engagement in your emails
5. Analyze the results

Now, tell me how you are using social media and email marketing to drive sales in the comments section below!

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