Why email outshines social media for building strong connections 

Email is the GOAT (greatest of all time) for both engagement and conversion in the digital landscape of marketing channels. Five years ago, we may have said similar about social media, but the tides are rapidly turning. If you’re a brand heavily investing in social media marketing but slacking on email marketing, you may want to reconsider.

As a consumer, when we are first introduced to a brand, we may have come across their website or found them through a social media channel. Whether they sell a product, service, or something of interest to you, you may be intrigued enough to sign up for their email newsletter.

As the marketer behind this brand, you will likely use social media and your website to build brand trust and affinity. But ultimately, you’ll build relationships by email.

You’ll note that we’re not discounting the need for social media marketing. It’s a key component of a holistic marketing strategy, and when paired with email marketing, you’ll be set up for long-term relationship success.

Social media marketing sits at the top of the funnel, catching user interest, enabling friends to share content they love back and forth via DM’s, and creating overall general awareness of your business offerings.

Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed significant changes in social media platforms, causing concern they are no longer the supreme avenue for building audience reach and relationships. Their tumultuous nature has led to various industry changes over the past few years. To start:

• Clubhouse, as a platform, rose to stardom and quickly fell in a three-year timespan
• Elon Musk purchased Twitter and renamed it X
• Meta shifts its focus to social e-commerce
• TikTok was very briefly banned in the US

Overnight, you may lose that audience (or your reach) you’ve worked so hard to build.

Ultimately, if you can turn your followers into subscribers, you have the key to communicating with them at any time with relevant content (no batch and blast approach here). That’s right: With email marketing, you control both your audience, your content, and your timing. Wait, can you not do this with social media?! In a way, yes, sure, you can. But there’s more to it.

Let’s say you gain a new follower. As a brand, you’re excited to share that you have a sale or a new product just hitting the shelves. How can you guarantee that this new fan of yours hears about this announcement first? Well, a social media post subject to an algorithm certainly doesn’t do that.

When you turn a follower into a subscriber, you have gained their explicit interest in hearing from you.

If your sale starts at 9 a.m. PT on January 31st, you can schedule both a social media post and an email newsletter at the same time. Ultimately, your email newsletter is more likely to reach that individual first and get them to your website to make a purchase.

That social media post could be buried under hundreds of others, depending on how frequently your followers check their accounts, how many others they follow, and what algorithms impact the various platforms you post on (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X to name a few).

Audience ownership is yours when it comes to email marketing whereas you don’t own your social media audiences. What happens when a new CEO joins and changes the purpose and name of the platform? Or when a hot new platform emerges and churns within a few years (we’re looking at you, Clubhouse)? It’s tumultuous to build a large following on social media without a next step for how you will continue that relationship off of the platform—as you never know when your reach will be impacted or dismantled.

When you take action to provide your followers with a means to hear from you off of the social media platform, you can not only communicate with them on your terms (i.e., you own the timing), but you can also craft content that is specific to them and their needs (personalized content).

Now, let’s say that follower-turned-subscriber received your email about your sale on January 31st at 9 a.m. PT and made a purchase—amazing!

You now want to encourage that individual to leave a review of the product they bought on your website—not only so that you can gauge whether they love it or not but also so that their experience can help shape others' impressions of your business!

It doesn't make sense to create an Instagram post asking your entire following to leave a review for a product they might not have tried. That leaves email as your best channel.

Email marketing enables you to use the data you collect on your subscribers to your advantage. Things like first name, birth date, and purchase history are just a few attributes and events that you can weave into your communications and create unique touch points.

Batch and blast emailing is so 2007.

Email offers endless opportunities for personalization. But what else makes email unique?

Depending on the social media platform, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. The content that is ‘eye-catching’ needs to be individually strategized.

• X (Twitter)? You’re limited to a character count of words that might capture your followers’ attention.
• Instagram? You better have a strong visual!
• TikTok? You need great video and trending audio to get views (and likes).

Email offers a rich blend of both image and text content, giving subscribers the best of both worlds.

There’s also a potential promise of content longevity, in which the subscriber’s inbox turns into a searchable database of previous communication from you and your brand.

When you combine the right time, personalization, and great content, your audience will take note.

Enabling actionable call-to-actions (CTAs) that guide readers toward conversion, whether purchasing, signing up, or downloading content, will benefit both you and your subscribers.

Those results are also entirely trackable—you can viably understand who clicked, who landed on your website, and who officially made a purchase—something social media platforms often lack!

People sometimes claim that 'email is dead,' pointing to evolving technology trends and the channel's age as evidence. Sure, the latest social media platform looks great and offers a few opportunities for virality, but you never know where the platform might end up in a few years' time.

Email marketing has been stable and has been on the up since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Originally built as a two-way communication tool, it's undoubtedly adapted since then.

When people say email is dead, it might be because, at times, it can be poorly executed and lack targeting and personalized content. But when done right, the strategy can be incredibly powerful.

So, no, email is not dead. As more businesses and brands realize that social media is not the best tool for building relationships, we know that email marketing will realize its value.

Email has proven to be a stable channel over the years (decades, really). Its opt-in engagement, less distracted environment, independence from algorithmic changes, and resilience to platform decline make it the perfect channel that all brands and businesses should invest in.

Customer.io offers a great solution for those looking to implement an email marketing strategy. It gives you an avenue to start sending amazing emails with personalization and crafted with best-in-class content. Sign up for a free 14-day trial today and see the difference for yourself!