Do you feel the pressure to keep growing your social media, but barely have time to focus on growing or communicating with your email list? Or perhaps you haven’t even started an email list yet because the tech seem scary or you don’t know what to say in your emails.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. But I’m here to tell you that focusing on your email list is essential. In this episode, I’m sharing the 5 reasons your email list is more important than social media.
5 Reasons Your Email List is More Important than Social Media
1. You own your email list.
You don’t own social media. When someone signs up to your email list, you are able to contact them anytime unless they choose to unsubscribe, of course.
But on social media, it’s up to the social platform how often they show your posts to your followers. You could even lose your account, which means all of those people who were following you are no longer seeing your content.
With your email list, the email is almost always going to get delivered. You don’t know for sure if it’s getting opened, but generally speaking it’s likely that your email list open rates are higher than the % of your followers seeing your content on social media.
2. You can go deeper on email than social.
This goes both ways; you might be willing to share something with your email list that you might not share on social. And likewise, your audience may share more deeply with you as well.
Email is more private, and therefore people open up more on email than social. I frequently get replies to emails with people sharing difficult things that they would very likely never share on my FB page or group.
It naturally feels more secure and private because it’s a communication between 2 people. The safety means that you can build trust and stronger relationships with others via email that you might not be able to otherwise.
This doesn’t happen overnight; people need to feel comfortable to actually email you and tell you stuff – so you have to be willing to be vulnerable and transparent yourself. But over time, you may see that the email replies are consistently showing you that people trust you.
3. It’s easier to sell via email.
While social media can be an amazing place to build community and have conversations with your audience, it’s often not the best for making sales.
I’m not saying it can’t be done – many people can and do generate sales via their social channels. I’m just saying that it’s tougher to do so than via email.
Most people are on social media for, well, social purposes. They aren’t always expecting to see marketing messages.
But this is fairly common within email. So if you send some sales emails once in a while or you have a launch where you are emailing more frequently, this is going to be more successful than if you are posting those same types of messages on social media.
4. You have more chance of capturing their attention via email.
Think about the time you spend on social media… most of it is typically scanning and scrolling, right? You’re scrolling until something catches your eye and then maybe you’re going to read a post that sounds interesting.
At the same time, there are tons of things vying for your attention – ads, messenger, stories, etc. These things are popping up, trying to get you to watch, click, or listen.
Within email, it’s more likely that the person is going to be paying attention. Now again, it’s not guaranteed and we don’t really know how far they read (maybe there’s some advanced software that can tell you but I don’t know if it). But it’s likely that if you do a good job with the subject line and the opening few lines, that you may have their attention longer than you do when they are on social.
5. It’s easier to track results using your email list vs. social media.
Now I just got done saying that you don’t know how far they read, but you CAN see your open rates and your click rates in most email softwares. Therefore, you can more easily track the results of the messages you are putting out into the world.
You might argue that you can track some of this in social media and that is true – you can often see the reach of your posts (i.e. how many people saw it) and also how many clicks. However, I would argue that overall, it’s easier to collect and track this data in your email list than on social. And again, the people who you are emailing are likely more valuable to you than your social followers simply because there is a higher chance of them potentially making a purchase.
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