With all the hype surrounding social media, it may be difficult to believe that email is more effective than social media. But if you are moving your prospects through the lead-to-lease funnel, this is indeed the case.
Email has four advantages over social media:
- Your email has a far higher reach than on social media.
- You have greater ownership of your message.
- You own your audience.
- You have a better quality audience and email has a higher ROI.
Read on for more on each of the above.
Four Reasons Why Email Rules
1. Email Has a Far Higher Reach than on Social Media
Not only is organic reach low for Facebook, but it has dropped by almost 50 percent over four months from October 2013 to February 2014.
Marshall Manson with Social@Ogilvy describes how Facebook’s average organic reach of content is as low as 2.11% for pages with more than 500K likes. Compare this with almost 100% reach of a sent email. Not only is organic reach low for Facebook, but it has dropped by almost 50 percent over four months from October 2013 to February 2014. We presume it has kept dropping since.
Email provides a far higher reach than on social media. While there is no guarantee that your prospect will read your message, they will at least be exposed to your brand every time you send a message.
2. Greater Ownership of Message
You have greater ownership of the message in your emails.
Email gives you complete control over the length of content, size of images, number of calls-to-action, etc. You also have control over text color, text size, message formatting, style, etc. As an added bonus, others cannot distract your readers with their unsolicited comments.
None of this can be controlled on a social network because they restrict the format and styles of your message.
3. You Own the Audience
With email, you own your audience. Here are two examples of how owning your audience can help you craft the right message for the right target:
Let’s imagine Mary gave you her email address and liked you on Facebook. We want to introduce Mary to the community, but we don’t want to post repetitive welcome messages to a broad audience on Facebook. We can use a series of welcome emails specifically targeted to Mary to introduce her to the community. This will introduce her to the community without annoying others on Facebook.
Now consider John who is interested in renting out your property. A special offer could give him the extra push he needs to sign the lease, but you don’t want to give that deal to everyone on Facebook. You can send an email targeted to John, so that only he receives the offer. This prevents you from giving the same discount to everyone on Facebook.
4. You Have a Better Quality Audience, and Email has Higher ROI.
Email provides a better quality audience. The term “quality” refers to how well you have built your audience to match your market. Email allows you to produce better results for personalizing your communication, and thus resulting in a higher return on investment.
According to the 2013 Audience Growth Survey, email has a higher quality audience and a better ROI than Facebook. It may not have the quantity of social media, but it is a classic case of quality over quantity.
Think of email from this perspective. According to Priit Kallas, “Email is like a phone book of your friends, but social media is more like a casual acquaintance.”
Conclusion
Email Simply Works Better
While social media is an indispensable tool, email is the best way to move your prospects through your lead-to-lease funnel. Email has a far higher reach, gives you greater ownership of your message and audience, and delivers a better quality audience with a higher return-on-investment.
How has your experience shaped your view on email vs. social media? Send us your stories at ideas@hy.ly.
See you at the top!
(This post is part of our series on 7 Ways to Get More Leases Using Email Nurturing.)