Why Both Social Media and Email Marketing Are Essential For Conversion
Social media and email marketing are arguably most efficient when used in tandem because each channel plays an important and separate role in your conversion funnel. Read on to learn more about why BOTH social media and email marketing are essential to your business’ marketing strategy in 2022.
THE MARKETING FUNNEL
To understand the role social media and email marketing play in our overall strategy, let’s take a look at a marketing funnel. Also known as conversion funnels, this tool helps us visualize the customer journey from when a person is first introduced to a brand all the way to when they are officially converted into a loyal customer. Funnels allow us to break down this journey into four basic stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty.
At the top of our marketing funnel, we have the awareness stage, where customers first hear about and discover your brand. Note that this is the largest stage in the funnel. Your brand will reach many people in its lifetime, but that number of people will continue to decrease the further down the funnel we go.
Why? Because not everyone that discovers your business will have enough, or any, interest in your brand to move into the second stage of the marketing funnel, which is the consideration stage. At this point in the funnel, users not only know about your brand but they are also interested enough to engage with it and evaluate how it might be of value to them.
From here, even fewer people will make it into the conversion stage, which is marked by a point of action indicating a commitment to your company, like purchasing a product or signing up for your email list. Lastly, the smallest amount of people will enter your loyalty stage. This stage is for only your most loyal customers, those who repeatedly buy, promote, and engage with you.
THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Now that we have the basics covered, let’s talk about the role social media plays in this funnel. Social media primarily covers the first two bases: awareness and consideration. With over 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook alone, social media is ideal for exposing your brand and message to a large audience. The best part? No opt-in is required. Thanks to features like hashtags, location tags, and “Explore” and “For you” pages (among other tools), the world is your oyster on social media for reaching new users on a daily basis.
A social media marketer’s primary goal is to reach this large audience and pique enough interest that users feel compelled to head to the website where a conversion can occur, like buying a product or joining an email list. Only after this conversion occurs could a user potentially move to the final and everlasting stage of the funnel, loyalty.
Check out more benefits of social media marketing in our Why Your Brand Needs to Invest in Social Media blog post.
WHY ADD EMAIL MARKETING?
Social media is great for exposure and fostering a relationship, but email marketing takes it a step further by supporting customers along their journey down your marketing funnel into the conversion and loyalty stages. Email marketing is a more personal, direct line of communication with your customers, meaning there is no algorithm determining whether or not they will receive your email. Think of your email subscribers as one step above your social media followers - these users have expressed enough interest in your brand to be subscribed to make sure they don’t miss a thing. Consider these audience members as WARM 🥵 and near-ready to convert!
Arguably the best part of email marketing is how tailored the content can be to each subscriber. We love creating pipelines and separating our email list into groups so we can tailor the content subscribers receive to what we know they will find valuable. Factors you might look at when doing this include noting the products the user has previously purchased or opted-in to, how frequently they open your emails, and more.
For instance, if a user has opted into our FREE 30 Days of Reel Ideas download, we can assume that this person is interested in learning more about Instagram Reels and incorporating the feature into their content strategy. Because of this, we might add this individual’s email address not only to our mailing list as a whole, but also a separate group entirely comprised of users interested in Reels. We could then start to warm up subscribers in this group to purchase our ReelTok Course by sending them emails tailored to their needs and pain points surrounding Instagram Reels.
Email marketing doesn’t have to be viewed as an entirely separate marketing channel with its own unique message. In fact, we recommend expanding the lifecycle of your existing marketing content by re-purposing it in your newsletter. Your latest blog post, press feature, or new product you highlighted on social media? Perfect for your email list!
Rather than seeing this as redundant, we urge you to consider the rule of 7 or mere exposure effect, which states that the more someone is exposed to something, the more likely they are to develop a liking towards it. Don’t believe me? Think about a song or fashion trend that you thought was TERRIBLE the first time you encountered it. After seeing or hearing it EVERYWHERE within the span of a few weeks or months, you find that you’ve actually grown to like it too! Marketing works the same way (hellooo, re-targeting!).
Overall, social media helps you reach a large audience of people and foster a relationship, while email marketing helps you further guide those users down your conversion funnel through personalized and targeted messaging. Looking to add social and email marketing to your marketing strategy? Fill out our client application form or subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date on our top tips!
xx- The Homies
