The Battle for Your Marketing Dollars: Email vs. Social Media

email vs. social media

In my book, I define several kinds of “marketing batteries,” two of which are the “Subscriber Battery” and the “Social Battery.”

Marketing batteries store attention, and are charged through your online properties. Your email list is your subscriber battery and your friends, followers and fans are charge your social batteries.

The subscriber battery can pack a real wallop, and so marketers get a scared of looking like spammers. The social battery is unpredictable in its ability to deliver attention back to your website.

Business people let email drive their daily tasks, checking their mail multiple times per hour. As a general rule of thumb, you want to get your email marketing program working before investing in social media.

We like email. The best way to make social media work for you is to charge your subscriber battery from it. Your email list is an asset you own. Your subscriber battery is at the mercy of people like Mark Zuckerberg. It can be taken away or shared with advertisers.

We feel vindicated by this infographic, which we think treats both batteries fairly.

If you think about it, email is the largest social network on the planet anyhow. So stick them both in your marketing petri dish and see what grows.

In 2012, email marketing delivered a return on investment (ROI) of 4,000 percent. And it’s easy to understand why – no matter how swiftly social media platforms have developed; email remains the single most popular online activity with 97% of users sending and writing emails. 

Still, social media marketing is not just resting in a neutral corner. It is growing, and exponentially. In 2012, small to medium sized businesses projected to increase their social media spending 100%.

So wouldn’t it make sense to pair these two golden gloves together within your marketing plan?

  • ·         94% of internet users using email
  • ·         61% of internet users are using social networking sites

Looking at those figures, you have to assume that 33% of the internet is using both, and that number is bound to grow. Think of the jabs will you land if you apply both tactics.  By using these tools cooperatively and proficiently in your marketing plan,you can strengthen your brand’s awareness, significantly increase your influence, and maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Now, throw your lab coat over your chair, take a seat, and get ready throw the throw-down of the year. 

The Matchup:  The pioneering folks at HostPapa created this knockout infographic. See how email fares in a scrap with social media. You might be surprised by the judge’s decision.

Hat tip to Marketing Tech Blog for drawing our attention to this.

Let’s Get Ready to Rummmblllllllle!

 email-versus-social-infographic

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A Quick How-To on Using Your Marketing Battery

This a guest post by Your Customer Creation Equation reader and email marketer Elliott Breadmore.

When I launched my first website I was full of excitement and enthusiasm, looking forward to providing thousands of people with valuable information that I had learned. Sharing my knowledge on my site was the easy part though. Getting the views is another thing.

For example, getting views through back linking can be a tediously long and frustrating process. It can require hours and hours of dedication and can sometimes have only minuscule results. If done wrong it can annoy viewers and bring negative sentiments to your site and actually have harmful or depressing consequences. When back linking you need to keep an overall positive attitude and thank people for their feedback.

Back linking: The process of going onto another site, talking about the subject in the post (normally related to your niche but not always necessary) and then leaving a link back to your site. The point of back linking is to increase the number of views that one of your pages receives, therefore boosting it up on the Google page rank.

This is where your “marketing battery” comes in; it is all about viewers and conversion rates. When your page receives views, you can expect 10% to go onto the squeeze page and request your free product, which then makes them subscribers.

Squeeze Page: A landing page created to solicit opt-in email addresses from prospective subscribers..

Now with those 10% of viewers that are now subscribers, we send emails offering valuable information so they keep coming back to our site wanting more. After 4-5 solid emails with helpful information, a sales letter goes out.

Sales Letter: An email, often in “letter” form, advertising a product.

This letter is, by definition going to those who are most worthy to receive it; they have not unsubscribed after the first 4-5 mailings.

We build a relationship with our subscribers during the first 4 or 5 emails, and then when they know that the information that we are providing is both legit and educational, the sales letter goes out.

Your email campaign can also be a difficult process. You specifically need to address each letter on the subject of your choice. When writing these first couple of emails , they need to be very informative, structured, and professionally friendly. These emails are crucial if you are to sell your product.

Using Email to Inform and Build Trust

I personally recommend the email being no longer than 400-600 words. You don’t want to burden the reader, but instead keep them interested and looking forward to the next one.

Keep in mind that your subscriber batteries will lose charge over time. Having multiple products that are consistently advertised to your subscribers can cause a drain on the juice, so keep an eye on your stats and evolve your strategy as needed.

You want to keep your subscribers happy, informed, and engaged, while avoiding product advertisement burnout.

Remember to keep your approach happy and positive; this will ensure that others enjoy your site as much as you do.

Elliott Breadmore is the Marketing Manager of Email Marketing Tips, one of the leading online resources for all things email marketing. His (and Email Marketing Tips’s) main goal is to provide fast-tracked education to aspiring email marketers.

Image courtesy jeroenbeel on sxc.hu

Charging Your Marketing Batteries with Video

 

The folks at video hosting company Wistia have made it easier to charge our marketing batteries using video.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with marketing batteries, here’s a quick explanation.

You spend time and money getting people to visit your site.

  • You invest in content that draws search traffic
  • You pay for advertising to get new visitors to your site
  • You share with social networks to get attention

Most of this traffic will bounce away or leak out of your site without taking action. Now, imagine that you can save up some of that hard-won and expensive traffic so that you could try again later to turn them into a customer. This is the job of the marketing battery.

One way to store marketing “juice” is the Subscriber Battery. It is charged by asking for – at a minimum – an email address, usually in exchange for some interesting time of content.

This is where we get back to Wistia’s new offering Turnstile.

Turnstile is a feature of the Wistia video player that requires a visitor to enter their email address before viewing your video. This is great news for businesses that are comfortable creating video, but get bogged down in creating landing pages, registration forms and logins.

Right now, Turnstile only allows you to collect email address; no names, phone numbers or qualifying information. Nonetheless, this is a nicely integrated way to use videos to charge a subscriber battery.

Now, what will you send these new subsribers?