Email Still Outperforming Social Media

A lot of people debate the pros and cons of Social Media, what I have come to call Social NOTworking – where people waste countless hours exchanging posts, chats, pokes, photos and other electronic elements with people they wouldn’t be caught dead with face-to-face. But that’s my personal bias AND I am not saying that Social Media is not worth doing – it is, but not for the reasons MOST people think…

That’s a discussion for another day and one I reserve for my paying clients to help them out-perform their peers by doing out-of-the-ordinary things that create extra-ordinary results.

Results that baffle their competitors – BECAUSE they (the competitors) have no clue…. Shhh! It’s called Stealth Marketing and means they can’t copy what you’re doing!

In support of my bias, I came across recent reports that continue to show that website traffic from social media networks is still pretty low.

SeeWhy studied 60,000 ecommerce transactions across a variety of sites in February 2011. Since running an online store is about selling things, they looked at only the people who actually loaded items into their shopping cart. Here’s one of the summary results:

Email Marketing Generates More Buyer Traffic Than Social Media

Online Traffic, SeeWhy

Email Marketing Still Outperforms Social Media

As you can see, email brought in the most traffic, with direct and search significantly less. Social media came in at only 4.3%, not great, but better than display advertising, so that’s something to think about.

Next they took that info and charted the percentage of people from each source who completed their transaction. In other words, the people who handed over their credit card number and hit submit.

Email Marketing Converts To More Sales Than Social Media

Online Conversions, Social Media, Email Marketing

If you want more sales, send more emails!

In the above pie chart you can clearly see that email and direct hits to the site still resulted in the best sales conversions, social media picked up a dismal 2.11% of the overall, but look at display advertising. Yikes, only 0.53% conversion rate? Maybe you should be spending money on your Facebook page rather than on display ads, but once again that’s a discussion for another day. Social NOTworking does have its place, but not where or how you might think. We explain this in our Killer Konversations™ Workshops if you’re interested…

At the end of all of this, SeeWhy does put in the usual disclaimer. Your mileage may vary and different types of ecommerce sites will have different results. While I understand that this is a study of ONLY 60,000 transactions, it supports my bias that email marketing still is the primary source for online sales.

There’s a fundamental reason – it’s a privileged conversation that people still value – as long as it’s not violated.

If you’re asking yourself why email marketing isn’t in the news more often, it’s because it simply isn’t as new and trendy as social media marketing.

The news “media” are always searching for new trends and buzzwords to fill their empty pages.

My clients don’t care about the buzz and hype – all they want is more people buying their products and services.

If that’s what you want – send them more emails – but not just any emails… That’s considered spam. You need to know what to send to whom.

That’s what we teach our clients to do – become a client today. Contact us now and we’ll help you avoid making mistakes that cost money and lost sales.

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