Email Marketing vs. Social Media - The Ultimate Verdict

If you’re a brand owner you’ve likely explored both email marketing and social media to reach a wider audience. But which is more effective and why?

Ultimately, they offer different benefits that depend on the nature of your business. Email marketing has been around for decades in one form or another and provides a targeted approach, while social media is the new kid on the block in comparison and can allow you to reach millions of users.

That being said, email marketing certainly isn’t going anywhere, and is arguably better when it comes to establishing a trackable return on investment (ROI) and reaching targeted audiences for your brand.

In this article, we’ll be delving into everything email and social media marketing to provide you with the ultimate verdict on which will better serve your marketing strategy.

Is email marketing better than social media marketing?

So, here’s the big question: is email marketing better than social media marketing?

If you’re looking for a trackable, targeted approach to your marketing, email marketing easily wins when pitted against social media marketing. With email, you can build an audience that are genuinely interested in your brand and then target them with specific content.

Social media is great for exposure, particularly if you manage to go viral, but this is less targeted and more likely to result in a wide reach but lower conversion rates.

It’s easy to spend a lot of money reaching millions of people on social media, however, we recommend a more targeted approach where you know for sure how your marketing is performing rather than going down the ‘blanket approach’ route.

Why email list is better than social media?

Let’s take a deeper dive into why email marketing is better than social media, and what benefits email can provide that make it come up on top.

More Targeted = Better Conversion Rate

The most prominent reason why email marketing beats social media marketing is that it is the more targeted marketing method of the two. With email marketing, you can build a tailored list of interested subscribers that literally sign up to receive your content.

This is beneficial for three main reasons:

• Better conversion rate - If you’re specifically targeting users that are interested in your brand, you’re more likely to get a higher conversion rate

• Higher ROI - Targeting users that you know are more likely to convert will provide you with a higher ROI, as you’re tailoring your marketing spend to users that will result in a conversion and therefore not wasting money on users that won’t

• More opportunities for further targeting - Once you have a tailored audience, there are even more opportunities for further targeting via audience segmentation. Here’s a guide to the key benefits of audience segmentation if you want to know more!

Measurable/Trackable

The fact that email marketing is more easily measured than social media marketing is another reason why it’s better.

With email marketing, there are a number of metrics that can be tracked to determine how your campaign is performing. Here are a few key metrics you can use to measure and track your email marketing:

• Open Rate

• Click Through Rate (CTR)

• Conversion Rate

• Bounce Rate

• Spam Score

You can also use specific landing pages and tracking codes to further measure how your subscribers react to your email marketing campaigns.

While you can reach a lot of people with social media marketing, it’s impossible to know what actions a potential customer took upon seeing your post/advert.

Landing pages can be used to some extent to measure social campaigns, but you’ll be unable to track how much money you’re potentially wasting on users that aren’t taking an action after seeing your content on social media.

For some key tips on tracking your newsletter performance metrics, take a look at this blog.

Higher CTR

You can generally achieve a much higher CTR on email marketing than with social media, which is largely due to it being the more targeted of the two marketing methods.

According to a report carried out in 2023, email marketing carries an average CTR of 3.57%, in comparison to social media marketing which has an average CTR of 0.07% on Facebook and 0.03% on Twitter (Mailmunch, 2023).

This shows that email marketing campaigns are far more likely to be engaging for users, which leads to other benefits such as higher conversion rates and ultimately a better ROI.

What is the advantage of social media marketing over email marketing?

There is a key benefit to social media marketing that is trickier for email marketing to achieve, and that’s exposure.

With a reported 4.9 billion people currently using social media (Demand Sage, 2023), social channels provide a huge number of people to target with advertising, particularly if you’re able to create viral content.

While this is a big advantage to social media, it’s also worth bearing in mind that most of these users will also have an email account - however, it’s potentially easier to target them via social media than it is to obtain their email address for email marketing purposes.

Is email marketing stressful?

Email marketing can be stressful if it’s not managed correctly. It can be easy to get muddled with subscriber lists if you’re not organized, plus it can feel like you’re not achieving results if your strategy isn’t particularly targeted.

Here are a few top tips for taking the stress out of email marketing:

• Test, test, and test again - Testing an email campaign ensures that you know exactly how it’s going to look when your audience receives it. It also allows you to check your newsletter works on all device types and correct any errors that need addressing.

• Use segmentation to improve targeting - Email marketing can be stressful if you’re not using the correct targeting methods. Segment your audience to achieve a more tailored approach and improve conversion/CTR rates.

• Utilize an effective email marketing platform - One of the quickest ways to make email marketing less stressful is by utilizing an effective email marketing platform such as beehiiv. This will give you the ability to schedule campaigns, store subscriber lists, and use ready-made templates to save you time and reduce stress.

Is email marketing still an effective strategy?

Email marketing is absolutely still an effective strategy, and we hope this article has allowed you to see its ease of use when using the correct platform.

Let beehiiv help make your email marketing less stressful with our measurable, easy-to-use email platform. There are many benefits to our system including audience segmentation, A/B subject line testing, unlimited testing, as well as access to our ad network to help monetize your newsletters.

Sign up for a free trial today with beehiiv and send your email marketing to the next level.