Survey Shows Email Marketing Still Packs a Punch Compared to Social Media Efforts

Marketing through social media is important to a comprehensive marketing strategy, but a recent industry survey shows that email marketing remains a powerful technique for getting your sales messages, offers and promotions in front of the people most likely to respond to them.

In an iConsumer survey conducted by the international management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, researchers discovered that email marketing can be as much as 40 percent more effective than marketing via social media. This result remains true even though the survey also found that in the years between 2008 and 2012, consumers spent as much as 20 percent less of their time using email than before.

McKinsey attributed the substantial performance of email marketing to their finding that more than 90 percent of consumers in the United States still use email every day.

Research also found that emails are as much as three times more likely to result in a purchase than social media marketing, and that the amount of purchases triggered by email marketing are nearly 20 percent higher than those prompted by social sites.

The McKinsey results indicate that savvy marketers should maintain a close allegiance to email marketing and focus on the following points:

• Email is just the first step, resulting in the first click, of the marketing process. Message elements such as copy and subject lines are used to prompt customer entry into the sales process.
• Email links should send users to a customized landing page directly related to the product or offer. This improves conversions and eliminates frustration that could result from a customer’s need to search for the information contained in the email.
• Email marketing helps you find out what’s working. You can quickly identify and isolate successful marketing messages and delete or modify less successful ones.
• Email allows more options for message personalization and customization. Focused emails that speak directly to customers and their needs will always prompt more conversions than generic or scattered messages.

Have you prematurely shifted your focus away from email marketing? How could you reinvigorate your email marketing program to take full advantage of its strengths?