Before social media, there was email marketing–Not that email marketing ever flopped down on the mat, despite social media apostles’ persistent efforts to pound out a TKO. Ironically social media acolytes seemed to have since huddled in their corner for a last minute strategy. When they re-emerged the audience was astounded to see them in BOTH corners, advocating a balanced, multi-dimensional marketing effort, where every medium has its place. And this is how the boxing analogy ends, but it’s still nice to know the score on email marketing after all the punches it endured from the social media camp.
Social Media Marketing
For comparison, we just blogged this piece about the 1% (or less, as is often the case) engagement rate ecommerce merchants can expect to see on Facebook. That rate can extend to other forms of social media as well. Out of a couple of thousand followers, you’re lucky to get two or three re-tweets, and even luckier to get people to attach their own commentary to the Tweet. Click through rates can be measured via Hootesuite and Bit.ly, and impression rates are being taken into account by Facebook.
One thing to note is that click-thru rates on marketing messages distributed on social media are all over the board. It’s not uncommon to see less than a 1% average, though the range can peak wildly if the topic becomes viral (a testament to getting the right content out at the exact right time).
Though Facebook’s impression feedback is professionally presented, it’s hard to know how many of those impressions are force counted. When even the most generic posts still get hefty impression counts, one has to wonder whether the impression rates really indicate anything other than the fact that users haven’t hidden the Page from their wall. Impressions really aren’t specific enough to impact marketing decision strategy.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is typically done using newsletters and other promotional blasts. As can be seen by these MailChimp newsletter open rate metrics, the open rate swings from 13-28%, depending on the industry, with up to 5% click through rate.
We’ve seen about the same in reviewing a number of newsletter metrics, though the percentages tend to increase, as one might expect, during sales or special event promotions.
But unlike with social media, email recipients typically aren’t expected to comment, engage, or be a part of an email list serve community. They just receive, click on what’s interesting, and buy accordingly. Many people felt that social media brought a special element to the shopping experience that email would fail to match. It was assumed that no one wanted to be pushed around by emails trying to sell them something; they wanted to tune in whenever they wanted and then talk with their friends before finalizing the purchase. While that’s somewhat true and happening to some degree on Facebook, this perfect “social media” world model is fundamentally flawed. People just don’t have the time to search and participate in sales discussions, so they still depend on newsletters and other emails for product announcements etc. from their favorite stores.
Can There Be Two Winners?
With that said, ecommerce marketing managers need to define conversion in order to properly compare rates. For example, if click through rates and ultimately a sale is considered a conversion, then social media might fall short. However if its more important to brand a new company or improve branding and public perception ( especially among a non-loyal customer base) and engagement rates are more important, then email marketing might fall short. The winning punch for the fighters in both corners is to hang up the gloves and focus on what they’re each best at: Put social media to work on the branding / community outreach line, and email on the loyal customer sales promotions beat. Every once in a while let social media and email marketing play together—customers want to tune into what you’re doing on social media so invite them to visit Facebook, Twitter. etc. Your social media fans may want to see what sort of inside-news you’re spinning in the newsletters, so don’t forget to send periodic newsletter invites to your Fans and Followers.
