Grow Your Audience with Email Marketing

Are you relying too much on social media to connect with your potential and current clients or customers? Are you panicking about the potential TikTok shut-down? Have you noticed the massive increase in spam comments and DMs on Instagram?

2022 saw a record increase in spam bots on Instagram and accounts (both large and small) being hacked or shut down, often resulting in account owners being forced to create new accounts and build their following from scratch. And now small biz owners are freaking out because TikTok may have to shut down in the US. Here’s the thing… you do not own your audience on social media.

If your Instagram account is hacked or deleted or the social media platform shuts down, you lose your audience. Not so with email marketing.

If a social platform changes its algorithm and you can’t keep up with the new “rules,” you either fork over money to reach the audience you worked hard to build, or you end up reaching less of your followers. The average engagement rate (likes, comments, shares) of posts on Facebook was 0.13%, Instagram 0.83%, and Twitter 0.05%. This means, of the people who are actually seeing your content on these channels, less than 1% are taking any action with your content. By contrast, the average open rate of an email is 21%. Now with Meta (Facebook & Instagram’s parent company), introducing Meta Verified as a way to force account owners to pay a monthly fee to keep their accounts secure… there hasn’t been a better time to reclaim your audience with email.

What does all this mean? Don’t put all your eggs in the social media basket. Is social media still important for attracting new business? Yes, absolutely. But it shouldn’t be your end-all be-all in terms of marketing, and it shouldn’t even be where you focus most of your efforts. On average, email subscribers are 20x more likely to engage with your content, 5x more likely to visit your website, and 4x more likely to make a purchase as compared to social media followers.