With recent scandals involving Facebook’s breach of trust, people are slowly migrating from social media platforms and are on the lookout for an alternative.
Facebook owns the user network and all of its user data which has caused a lot of users to delete their accounts and stay away from social media altogether. Publishers have found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place because they want to stay in touch with their audience, provide valuable content, and maintain their presence online where their audience spends most of its time, however many members of their target audience are deleting their accounts. How can they get in touch and provide useful content to those audience members?
The answer lies in email and using email marketing! Although Facebook is considered to be the largest social network, last year’s data reported only 2.2 billion monthly active users, which does not compare to the over 3.8 billion email users – estimated by the market research firm Radicati Group.
Email is the foundation of the community that publishers build themselves. Therefore, you are the direct provider of content to your audience. Your audience wants to hear from you, since they willingly signed up for your content to begin with. They’ve given you permission to take up space in their precious inbox because they like, know, and trust you. This is an amazing advantage that advertising via Facebook just doesn’t have. Facebook advertising is based on targeting a large number of people at one time with no guarantee that the chosen audience is in fact, 100% interested in your content.
Email marketing allows publishers to definitively measure engagement down to the individual. Email marketers can leverage data from market intelligence by keeping a more detailed track of what their competition is doing, newsletter sending times, and the best performing newsletter designs. Going even deeper with customer segmentation, you receive more information regarding each customer that opened the email newsletter and what their preferences are.
Email marketing allows publishers to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, and helps determine where they are in their customer journey. Facebook can’t match the awesome personalization option of email, nor can they match personalized adverts based on past click history in the email newsletters (helping with conversions and increasing ROI) which are all HUGE advantages that publishers can leverage. Advertisements in email newsletters are personalized based on click history, which helps drive conversions and increase ROI. Through utilizing the precise tracking tools that email marketing platforms offer, you’ll be able decipher which marketing message worked best to convert user actions in the future.
Email is more cost effective than Facebook, because the nature of advertising on FB is akin to throwing spaghetti against a wall in hopes that something will stick. Email on the other hand has an audience at the ready with raised hands.
Publishers own the email channel. Considering the Facebook user data breach, email is the safest way to promote and share content these days. You can still, of course, have a social media presence on platforms like Facebook, however, email was, is and will be the most effective social network for reaching a targeted audience.
For more information on how to monetize your email channel, get in touch with Jeeng today!
