Advantages of email marketing instead of messenger marketing
Messenger marketing is emerging rapidly with the help of mobile phone technology. However, email marketing has been around a long time. Gary Thuerk sent the first mass marketing email promoting DEC machines to 400 subscribers in 1978. This first email resulted in sales worth $13 million.
Email is still a powerful marketing channel today. It is flexible with limitless design opportunities. Text, images, gifs, graphics and video content can be incorporated within an email message. The unlimited character limit for emails leaves room for creativity.
Email is the perfect medium to achieve brand awareness. Another advantage of email marketing is that acquiring signups is easy. Effective email marketing tips includes adding a subscription box to a website to collect names and email addresses with an incentive to attract subscribers. You can also attach a signup link using various social channels.
Email is one of the most cost-effective channels to use. Email marketing can generate $38 for every dollar spent. Automation workflows and segmentation creates highly personalized drip email campaigns. When these campaigns are carried out correctly, it can lead to up to 20 percent more sales opportunities.
Of course, there are some disadvantages to email marketing as well. Many email subscribers tire of receiving so many emails and choose to opt-out of their subscriptions. Emails can also get lost in myriads of other emails already in subscribers inboxes.
Compared to social channels, email is one-sided. It is not conversational. You can send out an email, with little hope of receiving an email back from your subscriber. There is little chance of building meaningful relationships with email.
Using bulk email marketing services to send frequent emails or sending emails that are irrelevant could be flagged as spam. They will wind up in the junk folder. The other issue is that some emails will bounce because a) the subscriber’s inbox is full, b) because of server issues, or c) the subscriber’s email address is invalid. There is no guarantee of delivery for all emails sent out.
How to do email marketing
Email marketing has been the flagship of content distribution for a long time. Here is a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing.
Email Pros:
- It’s an owned asset.
- No need for bite-sized content.
- Build audiences for ads.
- People are used to marketing newsletters
Email Cons:
- Lower engagement rates than other forms of marketing like Facebook Messenger.
- More touch points are needed to gather data.
- It takes more time to segment users.
What is messenger marketing?
Facebook messenger marketing emerged in 2016. At the 2016 f8 annual conference for software developers in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the future of Facebook messenger and chatbot development. "We think you should message a business just the way you would message a friend," he said.
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) announced in 2019 that direct messaging apps are taking precedence over other social media applications. Chatbots are the latest ‘essential’ for businesses and brands progressing with the times. Just as a website was once the go-to for consumer research. Faceebook messenger marketing 2019 it is all about Facebook messenger and bots!
As with email, Facebook messenger is also a marketing tool to stay in touch with customers and leads. Over 1.3 billion people use messenger each month. This opens the doors to personal conversations with these customers and leads. Use messenger marketing to send customers offers, receipts, shipping updates, new featured products and other marketing messages. Messenger notifications are delivered instantly.
The personalized conversational style of Facebook messages provides incentives to customers to open these messages received on the messenger app. Messenger marketing boasts higher open and click-through (CTR) rates for messenger campaigns. Facebook messenger open rates could be as high as 88 percent and CTRs are as high as 48 percent for businesses with thousands of subscribers.
A Facebook messenger bot is a collection of digital messages that can answer questions, are programmed with simple artificial intelligence (AI) to provide automated responses. No coding is needed to create a facebook messenger marketing bot. Most bot platforms are designed to create these bots without any programming skills. It takes a few minutes to set up a bot to automatically respond to customer queries and questions.
Chatbots can respond to common questions. Customers might want more information about an e-commerce store or products. Bots also provide delivery updates, ask for feedback, send abandoned cart reminders and suggest other products to bot subscribers. The artificial intelligence aspect of chatbots helps to re-engage customers, qualify leads and handle transactions. However, sometimes human intervention is required to answer complex inquiries leading to increases in workload.
Another disadvantage to messenger marketing is that getting messenger subscribers is a lengthier process when compared to email signups. Some interaction (such as commenting on a Facebook post or receiving a message to your page) should take place before inviting people to become subscribers.
Facebook messenger vs email
As a result of too many emails landing in inboxes, the effect of email marketing has lessened in recent years. In contrast, messenger marketing is new. Not many companies use it to communicate with their customers. Even less do it professionally.
The biggest difference between email marketing and messenger marketing is email marketing is telling instead of talking. With email marketing there isn’t a dialogue with the email subscriber. News, stories and updates are shared in an in-depth manner. Messenger marketing is all about talking. Here is a one-on-one ongoing conversation with subscribers. This conversational approach includes asking questions and providing options all in short form copy.
A messenger chatbot can be used for direct dialogue with customers. Messenger marketing can be used to create dialogues and conversations to chat with chatbot subscribers to offer instant support or reactions to offer prompts. Using the same content from an email in a messenger conversation makes the message too long and unreadable.
Opt-in in email marketing consists of 4 steps:
- The user is on the Internet, Facebook, Google, Instagram or a blog.
- The user is offered a lead magnet – to get it he is transferred to a landing page.
- On the landing page the user must enter his email address and optionally other kinds of personal data.
- Before getting his lead magnet the user has to confirm his email address, which means he has to log into his email account, confirm the address and then gets his lead magnet.
Opt-in in messaging services consists of only 2 steps:
- The user is brought into the messenger via one of the 7 Growth Tools.
- In the messenger he enters a keyword (for example “start”), clicks the “subscribe” button and is done.
Email communication is top-down and only flow in one direction from the company to the subscriber. The email recipient has no other way of communicating with the company sending the email. Messenger marketing provides subscribers with the opportunity of active involvement in the conversation or interaction. Today most people want the company to communicate with them, not at them.
Email communication is top-down and only flow in one direction from the company to the subscriber. The email recipient has no other way of communicating with the company sending the email. Messenger marketing provides subscribers with the opportunity of active involvement in the conversation or interaction. Today most people want the company to communicate with them, not at them.
Combining email marketing with messenger marketing
It is possible to develop a facebook messenger strategy that merges email and messenger marketing together. Email and messenger marketing are complimentary to one another and are equally crucial for ecommerce businesses.
Messenger can be used for automated email address collection. The email addresses are collected and customers can enter automated drip email sequences. Email may be combined with Facebook to send the same campaigns. Make sure there is a delay between email and messenger campaigns to avoid annoying customers with too many messages received at the same time.
Messenger can be used for automated email address collection. The email addresses are collected and customers can enter automated drip email sequences. Email may be combined with Facebook to send the same campaigns. Make sure there is a delay between email and messenger campaigns to avoid annoying customers with too many messages received at the same time.
Email has worked for several decades. People send emails daily, making it a great channel to reach customers. Email marketing still works well. However, the only problem is that it’s working less well with each passing year. The opens the door of the future to messenger marketing and chatbots. You can decide the best marketing approach to take after looking at this infographic.
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National Museum of American History
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