Hi, Friend!
I used to work for a blood center where I was 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 I 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 I would post an urgent message asking people to donate.
Unfortunately I was limited by Facebook's algorithm and typically only 100 - 125 people (1% of my audience!) would see my post. For emergencies like this, I would even pay to boost the post's reach but that would maybe increase it to 1,000 followers.
And even when the post reached 1,000 followers, the message most likely got lost in the sea of other posts. So when I posted an urgent message on Facebook, it generally didn’t result in appointments or walk-ins.
But when I sent an email, that got people’s
attention. The minute I sent an email we had people calling to schedule an appointment and the number of people walking into the blood center to donate would increase.
Our email list was about the same size as our Facebook followers. But it was the email that drove
people to take action (learn which is better: email or social media).
Why? It’s simple, it really came down to two reasons:
- My email reached 100% of subscribers while Facebook reached maybe 10% of followers if I 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 Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, or Instagram making NO attempt to get them to sign up for an email list (here are 10 experts that share their best tips for growing your email list with social media).
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 (learn how to turn your social media followers into email subscribers).
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.
So get your email capture landing page and welcome campaign ready and start growing your email list with your social media followers (see how to grow your email list with Facebook).
