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Alright, so by now you’ve probably heard of all of the commotion going on online about what is the best digital platform between email marketing and social media marketing. Some people have even asked themselves, “Should we be ditching email marketing to focus on social media?” While that question may have raised some of your eyebrows, I’m here to tell you that email is not dead, but it is very much alive . While social media marketing and email marketing to your customers, clients, and leads each have their own benefits, a well rounded marketing strategy includes both platforms for communicating with your customers. Let’s go over the strength of each of these tools, some data to back that information up, and how your insurance agency can capitalize on implementing both into your marketing strategy for 2017.
Overall Performance Statistics
People may be asking right off the bat, how could email ever be replaced by social media marketing? Well, 83% of marketers say that social media is important to their business, according to Hubspot. Although, when comparing two different marketing channels, it’s important to observe statistics and data behind each of them. First things first, let’s take a look at performance statistics for both email marketing and social media marketing to see how things really stack up.
To properly sum up some of the key performance statistics across each platform, we’ve created the chart below and highlighted the optimal platform for each individual metric in red (with data taken from Radicati, Statista, ExactTarget, and Dreamgrow).
So what does this all mean exactly for your insurance agency’s marketing? Well, let’s break it down one step at a time. First of all, for those saying “email marketing is dead,” this chart should be an eye opener. Email marketing outperforms social media across the board, except for one section, being users who are sharing your content. That doesn’t mean that social media is dead either though, because it still has many uses that you should be embracing. Let’s delve even deeper.
Usage Comparisons
For the first time ever, back in 2012, email had hit an all-time high in user count of 1 billion active users. In today’s world, the number of users has grown past 1.6 billion, and is projected to reach over 2.9 billion by the end of 2019 as well. This is huge. It’s not rocket science when you think about it though. How many times has a site required you to have an email address to proceed? What about getting service in person? Email addresses are something that we ask of all of our customers to provide for us, and many other businesses do too in order to do business with them. It’s no wonder that the user count is still growing, and rapidly.
So what about when your customers first wake up in the morning, and have several notifications to clear on their computer and/or smartphones? Well, if we look at this chart from ExactTarget, we can see that Email is still ahead of the pack here as well:
Not to mention, individuals who check their mail first thing in the morning are more “task oriented” online, meaning that they are the most likely for converting into customers and engaging on your content. This is great news! Especially considering that 77% of consumers prefer email over social media when it comes to permission based messages, such as those that convert them into customers. This should be no surprise, because behavioral patterns online have dictated our customers way of thinking. Long story short, email is the place they expect to see sales based interactions from your agency, simply because that is the “norm” for society now. Now that it’s habitual, things likely won’t change there for a while.
Marketers in today’s world agree that email is, simply put, the best platform for making sales and converting leads online, period. So where does this leave us with social media?
A Winning Combination
When it comes to digital marketing, you can only strengthen your reach by using multiple channels to engage your audience. At the end of the day, you shouldn’t be ditching email marketing or social media, because they work great together hand-in-hand. If you’re looking for a winning combination, then you have to make the most of each channel’s individual strengths. When it comes to social media, it is a great tool for strengthening your brand, nurturing client relationships to help your renewals, and providing an excellent overall customer experience to your clients/customers. Meanwhile, it’s clear to us that our customers and clients want to be reached out for anything sales related via email, as it’s still dominating its niche. We hope that you make the most of your digital marketing tools moving into 2017, and to all agents and brokers out there, happy marketing!
