How to Combine Email and Social Media Marketing Efforts to Maximize ROI

Brands are expected to spend $247 billion on social media marketing in 2024 to fight for consumers’ attention. With people spending more than two hours a day on social media, brands would be foolish not to spend their ad dollars on social platforms, right?

According to recent data, brands may have it all wrong. For every dollar businesses spend on social media, they get $5 back. Even though this is considered a good return on investment (ROI), other marketing channels, such as email, perform seven times better.

Email marketing has a ROI of 3600 percent worldwide and 7200 percent in the U.S. This means that businesses get $36 for every dollar they spend on email marketing, or $72 if they are based in the U.S.

People don’t open their social media apps to view ads; they’re just a part of the experience. With email, it’s the opposite. People choose to receive them. When they open their inboxes, they’re looking to shop and you have their attention.

Email Marketing Outperforms Social Media Marketing

The ROI difference alone isn't the only metric that proves how email marketing outperforms social media. Consider the following:

• The clickthrough rate (CTR) for social media platforms is 0.5 percent to 2 percent. Compare this to the 1.7 percent for scheduled emails and 5.7 percent for behavior-based (i.e., automated) emails.
• The conversion rate for social media is 0.02 percent to 0.04 percent while email is 0.07 percent for scheduled campaigns and 1.99 percent for automated messages.

How to Combine Social Media Efforts With Email Marketing to Get the Best Results

Even though social media marketing is less effective than email marketing, the most effective strategy is taking a 360-degree approach and combining different marketing channels to achieve the best results.

Here are three ways brands can combine their social media and email marketing efforts to maximize their ROI:

1. Use email collection pop-ups on websites. Attempt to capture emails from every single web visitor, including those coming from social sites. The more brands connect the social media and website experience the better their marketing efforts will perform.
2. Use behavior-based automated emails. Automated emails generate 41 percent of all email marketing orders on only 2 percent of total sends. These messages are triggered by user behaviors, such as abandoning a shopping cart or browsing products on your site, making them timely, relevant and effective. With a 1.99 percent conversion rate, every order from email means spending less on retargeting campaigns on more expensive social media platforms.
3. Sync data with ad platforms. A brand’s email marketing provider should automatically sync with third-party ad platforms like Meta. This means brands can automatically update retargeting audiences on social media platforms, helping lower overall marketing costs and creating a better user experience. 

What’s hot isn’t always what’s best. From a business perspective, marketing is about maximizing ROI, and here is where email marketing is established, consistent and superior. Say what you will, but email marketing isn’t dead. It’s just getting started.

Greg Zakowicz is a veteran marketer and the senior e-commerce expert at Omnisend, the all-in-one e-commerce marketing automation platform.