Email Marketing vs Social Media

Christine Foulds • July 1, 2023

This post was first published in 2018.

With the rise of social media many predicted that email marketing would disappear from the marketing mix and marketeers would primarily depend on social media.

We all know now that this is not the case.

Both play an essential part in any business but which one out of the two brings you the best return on investment? Which one should you focus on?

Email Marketing

Let me ask you this: How many email addresses are you currently using? I have four which I check frequently thoughout the day. I imagine it’ll be the same for you and the majority of people. Everyone has an email address.

Now, sending out an email newsletter doesn’t guarantee success. To be honest, box standard newsletters are a dying out breed. Why? Because they’re not personalised and have nothing to do with the needs and wishes of the customer.

So, think of your customer communication lifecycle. At what point do you initiate contact, provide valuable information and seal the deal?

Your customer data is the fuel that keeps your email marketing engine going. Without the data, there will be no email marketing.

Think of all the data you’ve got on your customers and at what stage they are on your customer lifecycle. Do they have an abandoned cart? Is there a birthday coming up? Do they prefer a specific fabric/colour/service? Have they made a repeat purchase? Or not?

Most of these targeted email correspondences can be automated. MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and other providers offer an automation functionality which is very straight forward to set up.

Email marketing allows you to give your customer personal attention through automation which means personalised communication has the potential to be scaled infinitely. What does that mean for your business? Growth.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has been growing at an incredible rate and it’s going to continue. It’s a digitalised word-of-mouth marketing channel that can do wonders for your business.

As we all do, your customers search for recommendations, pre-purchase information and user experiences. It’s what we used to do face to face.

The reason why social media is still growing, and most businesses are embracing it whole heartedly, is that you can join in on the conversation your customers have about you. You can now strategize your digital word-of-mouth by re-assuring potential customers and re-affirming your expertise to existing customers.

Building relationships and trust on social media takes time and is not always as straight forward as the above paragraph makes it look like. There are many businesses out there who spend a lot of time on their social media channels but hardly get any return for it. That’s not the fault of social media but rather of the messages that are put out there. But that’s a blog post in itself.

So what next?

As you might have expected, use both if you can. However, if you struggle with time and social is not working so well, focus on email marketing by working on your customer communication lifecycle, your automation processes and in general a much more targeted email marketing approach.

Once that is in place, maybe you will find the time to revisit your social media marketing and use it as a lead generation tool.

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Closures, Launches And Everything In Between

June 7, 2024

To say that the last few weeks have been extremely busy would be an understatement. There has been a lot of change over the last few weeks and we’re still in the midst of it. So, what’s been going on? Some brands were let go. Seven of the bingo brands that I was looking after have been sold to a new owner. This meant a lot of handovers, finishing of campaigns and preparing as well as executing the exit strategy well. It was with mixed feelings seeing these brands go as I’ve been working with them for over eight years. However, feelings aside, it was a very good business decision. Some brands were migrated. On top of handing over existing brands, I also managed to migrate one of our current casino brands to a casino environment that we’re already using with the remaining casino brands. This was actually a very smooth process as most of it was handled by our partner Progress Play. Nevertheless, the CRM journeys had to be updated and we also took this as an opportunity to give the marketing material a bit of a refresh. Two of our bingo brands are being launched at a completely new platform with a company in Manchester called Grace Media. This has been very time consuming as we’re starting completely from scratch. I’m getting to know new systems like XtremPush which I’ve not used in the past. Setting up new CRM journeys, promotions, terms and conditions as well as updating the look and feel of the brands has kept me very, very busy. New brand was taken on. As part of the new partnership with Grace Media , we took on a new bingo brand called BOGOF along side our two brands that we’ve migrated to Grace Media. I had the pleasure of going to Manchester and working with the team for a week. What else? On top of that, I started work with a new Klaviyo customer called Blue Line Abrasives . It’s an industry that I know where little about so it’s great to have their team at hand to assist when I have product related questions. What’s next? Over the next few weeks, things should slow down and settle a bit. Fingers crossed.

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Has it really been three years?

By Christine Foulds • September 22, 2023

On a Friday afternoon, when all the main tasks had been done, I wondered when was the last time that I uploaded content onto my blog? I knew it has been a while, but I would have never thought that it was close to three years. Yikes! It’s one of the key rules of digital marketing to stick to a frequency of posting content online but as everyone can see, I failed. Luckily, the reason puts a smile on my face. I'd always hoped that I would be in this position when I first decided to set up FouldsCRM. I’ve just been incredibly busy. Over the last three years, I’ve increased my client portfolio quite significantly. Here is a quick overview: I started to work with the email marketing platform Klaviyo assisting three of my clients to migrate from Mailchimp to Klaviyo. None of them have regretted their decision and have seen a boost in email marketing sales due to changing the platform. I started to manage the CRM for 8 additional casino brands who use the Progress Play software. This was quite work intensive as we were the first ones to run their own CRM out of all of the Progress Play partners. It’s been an incredible 12 months since we took over the CRM. I welcomed back clients that were lost due to COVID which was really lovely. The travel industry was hit especially hard so being able to work with these businesses again has been really rewarding. I joined Mayple as one of their email marketing experts as part of their partnership with Mailchimp. The project aimed to show existing customers how to use the platform more effectively. Even though I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the Mayple community, I decided a few weeks ago to stop as most of the clients are based the United States. The time difference wasn’t working for me and my family. Family always comes first even though I’d have loved to continue working with the Mayple team. I worked on a few ad-hoc projects. Even though my blog and overall website haven’t been updated as much as they should have been, FouldsCRM is busy and I’m open for business!