In this scenario, would you use social media or email?
Amanda used to work for a blood center, responsible for the marketing and communications. This was an important, you could even say “life-saving”, job because there would be times where the blood supply was so low that she needed to send out a message urging people to donate blood.
The blood center had about 10,000 Facebook followers who wanted to know when the local hospitals needed blood, so she would post an urgent message asking people to donate.
Unfortunately she was limited by Facebook’s algorithm and typically only 100 – 125 people (1% of her audience!) would see the post. For emergencies, she would even pay to boost the post’s reach. But that would maybe increase it to 1,000 followers.
Even when the post reached 1,000 followers, the message most likely got lost in the sea of other posts. So posting an urgent message on Facebook, generally didn’t result in appointments or walk-ins.
But when Amanda sent an email, that got people’s attention. The minute she sent an email she had people calling to schedule an appointment and the number of people walking into the blood center to donate would increase.
Her email list was about the same size as her Facebook followers. But it was the email that drove people to take action.
Why? It’s simple, it really came down to two reasons:
- The email reached 100% of subscribers while Facebook reached maybe 10% of followers even if she paid to promote.
- There is less competition for a subscriber’s attention in the inbox compared to a social feed.
This is just one of many situations where email is much more powerful than social media.
Yet I see people with hundreds, even thousands of followers (heck, I saw one fitness coach with over 1 million followers on YouTube) on X, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram making NO attempt to get them to sign up for an email list.
This is just mind-boggling to me. What would happen if one of those channels shut down or closed your account? All that hard work building those followers would be lost.
It doesn’t matter how large or small your audience is on social media, it’s never too late or too early to start capturing your audience’s email addresses.
Once they share their email address with you, it’s yours forever. And now you have a very powerful way to communicate to your audience when you have new content, videos, products, classes, or anything else you’d like to share with them.
This article was shared with me by >> Aweber – open your free account here <<
When you’ve opened your account, contact me, and I’ll show you how to monetise it.
PS Yes, perhaps they DO have a vested interest in you building a list. But it’s only when I started building an email list that I started making money online. Coincidence? I think not.
