Social media has been growing at an unstoppable pace for years. Its dominance over daily life might make you think that email marketing has been replaced, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Email marketing offers many tools that social media lacks. With the highest reach and conversions of all digital channels, neglecting email marketing to focus on the next big social media trend could jeopardize your ability to effectively market your business. 

Here are 7 things you can do with email marketing that you cannot achieve with social media marketing alone. 

1. Reach your audience

Social media reach depends on many factors that you can’t control. Because those factors are constantly in flux, it can be hard to even reach your own followers. 

For instance, only about 5.2% of your Facebook followers see your posts. Meanwhile, email offers a much more reliable means of communicating with your audience. Businesses in most industries can expect their email bounce rate (the number of emails that don’t reach the inbox) to hover below 1%.

As long as you create compelling subject lines and deliver relevant content, you can be confident that your email marketing is getting through to your audience.

2. Divide subscribers into unique audiences

Research by Twilio shows that businesses strengthen customer relationships when they send relevant messages through their customers’ preferred channels–namely, email. And many customers will reward businesses with clicks and purchases. 

Segmentation allows you to do just that. Unlike social media, email enables you to divide your audience into segments based on their age group, purchase history or any other factors that might help you create personalized content. Then, each email segment can receive campaigns targeted to their unique interests and needs. 

3. Automate emails to send at important times

Another way email enables you to create personalized content is through automation, which lets you interact with shoppers at pivotal moments in their customer journey.

If a shopper abandons an online cart or a past customer hasn’t returned in a while, you can automate emails to re-engage them. In our increasingly digital age, automation provides the kind of personalized attention that’s often unique to face-to-face sales. 

4. Easily test different strategies

There are tons of factors to consider when designing email campaigns. The subject line, layout and time of send each have an impact on whether your email achieves its goal. Even minor changes can have a huge impact on your success.

Fortunately, email lets you test different campaigns to determine what’s most effective with your subscribers. That information can help guide future campaigns and drive better results with your email marketing. 

5. Maintain a reliable line of communication

Although email marketing is not immune to changing trends, you have significant control over the effectiveness of your campaigns. 

With social media, you can invest tons of time in a campaign only for the algorithm to keep people from seeing it. Plus, a new social media platform could pop up–siphoning users from the platforms you’ve used to build a following. 

While social media platforms wax and wane in popularity, email remains a reliable way to interact with your audience.

6. Boost sales

All the features we’ve previously mentioned–that they can be customized, targeted, automated and more–contribute to making email one of the strongest ways to boost sales. One reason email is so successful in this regard is that shoppers simply like receiving promotional messages via email. 

In fact, a Twilio survey discovered that 83% of shoppers prefer when companies contact them via email to promote products and services. When shoppers want to receive offers and updates from businesses, they sign up for their email list. 

7. Multiply your investment

Email marketing has significant reach, stronger engagement and even boasts an impressive return on investment, with every dollar businesses spend generating an estimated $44 in profit according to Optinmonster. 

However, email marketing can’t turn these profits without hard work. To leverage the unique benefits of email marketing, you need to conduct tests, segment your audience and carefully design your campaigns. In other words, take advantage of the tools email marketing offers. 

For more information about why it’s worth investing in email marketing, check out 5 reasons to include content marketing in your budget.  

How to make email marketing work for you

While social media is most successful at growing your audience, email marketing succeeds at getting customers engaged with your business. That means social media marketing and email marketing need one another, but managing both channels–and consistently producing valuable content–is challenging. 

The team at Agency 102 is skilled at creating email and social media content, and we know how to integrate these channels into a cohesive strategy aimed at building your brand. For help with your email, social media and content marketing strategies, get in touch!