Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? The brand with the most likes and shares, of course!
Email and SMS are simply not as sexy as social media. Opens and clicks aren’t as “cool” as likes, retweets, views, and shares. Kudos to social media; we’ve all been trained in a true Pavlovian manner to base our entire self-worth on vanity metrics.
Between people screaming that “email is dead,” brands sharing Facebook ads all over our feeds, and influencers hawking products to millions of followers, it’s no wonder that email & SMS gets overlooked.
Quick stats from OptinMonster: even if social media is more prominent in our lives, the channel converts abysmally. The statistics below are pretty generous; the top 1% of brands in the world experience ridiculously low conversion rates from social media. But they know that – which is why they run ads on their site with one goal: capture emails & phone numbers to convert visitors into customers.
There are no email forwards or referrals that brands can share with the public, but a like or comment is visible to the world! Vanity metrics look great to everyone, so I can certainly understand the appeal. I also look at our posts, videos, and podcast statistics and smile at every metric. But, for us, email and SMS convert leads into customers.
Neglecting the email and SMS channels for vanity metrics on social media is an easy way to lose sales. Vanity metrics are reason number six why brands fail at email and SMS.
For most brands, though, the urgency isn’t quite there. For some brands, the lack of a strong email and SMS strategy is merely an opportunity they haven’t seized yet and haven’t truly felt the pain of customer churn. For others, losing customers is a critical problem they needed to solve yesterday. Stop and think: which category does your brand fall under?
Because some brands are constantly in the weeds of the business due to the pandemic and haven’t stepped out to see the forest from the trees, the next chapter specifically addresses why establishing a strategic email & SMS plan is critical right here and now.
This Marks the end of the list I hope you find my writing helpful and for the rest of the details on this topic Checkout my previous blog post.