Marketing Minutes Episode 3: Comparing Social Media to Email Marketing (Video)

Here we talk about email marketing (newsletters etc) and social media, the roles they play, how they are different. Plus, we mix in a few key things you need to know for small businesses, nonprofits, and local marketers in general.

In our first Marketing Minutes Episode 1, we looked at the difference between Facebook Profiles and Pages and in Episode 2 we talked about the role and importance of a blog on a small business website.

The importance of email marketing and email newsletters

Email newsletters are often dismissed as an old-school marketing technique but they're still valuable. In fact, in most cases, email subscribers are worth more than dozens of social media followers due in part to reduced reach on Facebook & Instagram.

This is one of the reasons why email is a key channel when it comes to distributing your content online and one of the 5 ways people find you (see Marketing 3-4-5™ for more).

Our Express Email Newsletter feature takes the repetitive, soul-crushing busy-work out of creating emails and enables you to distribute content FAST... that's why we call it Express.

Email marketing and bulk email the wrong way

If you've ever send a bulk commercial email by cc'ing or bcc'ing a bunch of people - STOP!

This may be illegal and a violation of CAN-SPAM law that carries the potential for both jail time and a hefty fine - seriously.

Not only that, people are more likely to mark your content as spam since they can't unsubscribe which hurts your deliverability i.e. future emails won't reach inboxes and you get not exposure to who opens or clicked on things in the mail.

Just don't do this and if you see someone doing it, share this article about illegal and costly email practices.

Create your free Locable account - upgrade to unlock Express Email Newsletters and other great feature enhancements.

Video Transcript (Summary)

Marketing Minutes with Brian and Shannon

Shannon: I read somewhere that, and I'm gonna read you some statistics because I wrote them down but I did not write the source.

Shannon: The question generally is, "why do I need to email my customers or "spam them" is what many people think of when they do that because I have a Facebook page, I have an Instagram account, I'm on twitter I'm snap chatting, whatever... why do I need to also then email my customers? So that's the first question, I have all those other things why do I need email?

Brian: For most businesses email will always be more valuable. So we've all now heard of "the algorithm" on Facebook and probably the algorithm on Instagram and Twitter as well and the sheer reality is on all of these platforms we scroll through stuff and there's a finite amount of stuff we can scroll through. But yet with our friends and family and the businesses we follow, they're pushing us stuff as a three years ago and actually 2015 there were five times more things being shoved at us than we were consuming.

So, by sheer volume they have to trim what you see so what that means is that most of the stuff destined for you you never even get a chance to scroll past.

However, email, if I subscribe to our email newsletter, then you send me something and it shows up. It gets there. I might not open it - that's a separate issue - but it gets there. I have the choice to make and so for that one reason alone there's tremendous value.

The next thing is Facebook and Instagram and all these platforms, you're renting an audience.

You may have a thousand fans but the average post reaches two percent which is like twenty people. So that's subject to change. Facebook could decide, hey you know what you no longer allowed to have a page here, that's done.