Email vs Social Media: What sells best?
Overview
When you Google for "email outperforms social media" you'll find hundreds of articles that attempt to explain why that's true.
When you Google "social media outperforms email", you'll find hundreds of articles that attempt to explain why email marketing outperforms social media.
While I in no way conducted a structured study with a control group, etc, etc, there does seem to be a strong consensus that email marketing outperforms social media marketing.
In this article I'm not going to explain why this consensus exists. After all there are hundreds of articles out there that already do.
I like this one from MailMunch (bear in mind they sell email marketing services). While I can't personally verify the numbers and statistics in their article, they look reasonable to me and the article does a good job of making their case: Email Marketing vs Social Media Performance in 2016.
In this article I'm giving an overview of the different types of email marketing, and advising where to start for people who don't currently do any.
Email Newsletters
The defining characteristic of the newsletter is that everyone on your list gets the same email at the same time.
One error (I believe) many people who send newsletters make is they're too long. They reference 6 or 8 different topics or ideas. To which I say "I'll file this away and read it later", which of course I never find time to do.
My advise is to keep them short so that people actually read them.
You can get email newsletter services from a variety of vendors, such as MailChimp or Constant Contact. When your list is small you can do this for free.
Auto Responder
An auto responder is where a sequence of email messages are sent in response to some trigger event. Someone downloads an eBook you put on your website and that triggers a sequence of 8 emails which go out on a predefined schedule.
With auto responders everyone gets the same sequence of emails, but on their own individual schedules.
Auto responders are available from all the major email marketing vendors, but I know of none that are free. Having said that when your list is small, it can cost as little as $15 a month.
Marketing Automation
This is the most involved to setup. It's like an auto responder but with if-then branches. It ties together not just the sending of the email but actions the recipient may or may not take.
What email they're sent next is determined by whether they did or did not open the first email as well as by whether they did or did not clicked the link in the first email to visit the web page on your site.
The setup of marketing automation is much more involved, but it's also the most effective (which for I hope are obvious reasons).
However, the setup of marketing automation can seem intimidating to someone just getting started with email marketing.
Case in point.... I know this stuff and I still don't have my marketing automation act together.
While some marketing automation platforms are really expensive, there is at least one really cheap one. It's called Mautic and it costs only $12 a month.
How to get started....
Start with whatever works for you.
If you're just getting into email marketing, start with a weekly newsletter. If you already have a weekly newsletter, implement an auto responder campaign.
I strongly recommend you use a marketing automation platform to build your auto responder campaign.
That way, later you convert it from an auto responder to a more sophisticated marketing automation system one piece at a time.
Implementing a marketing automation system reminds me of the old (and bad) joke of....
Q: How do you eat an elephant?
A: One bite at a time.
The main thing is to start and make incremental improvements over time.