When you’re devising your advertising strategy, there are a lot of factors to consider: where your ideal customers spend time, the cost of different platforms, and the scalability of campaigns may all be worth thinking about. Ultimately, though, the factor that will determine success often comes down to return on investment.
It makes sense: if you aren’t recouping your investment, paid advertising doesn’t make much fiscal sense. That’s why we decided to weigh two advertising options to determine the best course of action for your campaign ROI: email advertising and social media.
Where should you be investing? Read on to find out.
Email Advertising ROI
When considering email advertising versus social media, there are a few factors in which email advertising comes out on top, including:
- •Reach
- •Engagement Rate
- •Targeting Potential
- •Conversions
First, you may think that email advertising cannot have the reach that social media advertising has because of the sheer number of people on social media. Once you consider that the average email open rate is around 20 percent, depending on industry and list, and can be even higher, you’ll see why email advertising winds up on top for reach.
While you may be able to reach a larger audience in theory on social media, your actual engagement rates will generally be much lower than the open and click rates on email advertising campaigns.
Plus, 20 percent open rate is just the average—you can reach more readers through email advertising by selecting a list to work with that has higher open and click rates.
You can also ensure high engagement by choosing a niche list that aligns well with your target audience. The targeting potential of email advertising is great because you can ensure that your audience is highly interested in a topic related to your brand—enough so that they opted in to get regular emails about it.
Email advertising also tends to get higher conversions than social media, which is likely due to the borrowed authority from a source that readers trust—the newsletter they followed in the first place.
Even if a reader hasn’t heard of your brand before, the fact that your message is coming from a source they are used to clicking on and engaging with helps to boost your authority. On social media, it often takes multiple interactions to attain that kind of brand affinity that encourages conversions.
Email Advertising CPC
But when it comes down to it, if you’re looking for email advertising ROI, you need numbers. Here at Paved, we like look at email engagement metrics combined with a given publishers CPM to give the cost per click (CPC) of a campaign.
CPC is a helpful metric for comparing advertising techniques since it shows the cost for actually getting someone to your landing page. What you do from there is up to your own killer marketing techniques and, of course, your conversion rate on that page.
At Paved, we did some research and found that our top performing publishers have a CPC below $1.50.
In the last 90 days, the average CPC of email advertising through Paved is $0.83, and one of our most successful and experienced advertisers gets an average of $0.57 CPC on their first campaign with a given publisher. (They will run an ad to a list every few months until the CPC rises above their comfortable threshold.)
If you want to figure out the CPA for a campaign you’re thinking of running, you can calculate it using the ROI calculator on any publisher page in the Paved marketplace. Just enter your landing page conversion rate to see numbers tailored to you.
Social Media Advertising
While there are a lot of advantages to using email advertising, there are some aspects of advertising where social media still comes out on top, including:
- •Shareability
- •Branding
- •Assisted Conversions
The fact is, no matter how great an email is, most people just don’t forward email advertisements to friends. On social media, however, there is always the possibility that your funny or engaging post will be shared or even go viral.
To increase shareability, be sure to create social media content that stands out: a hilarious video, an informative article, or even just a particularly innovative product will be more likely to get shares than a standard ad that looks like all the others.
Social media also gives you the opportunity to share your brand and create brand affinity over time. Rarely do social media ads convert the first time someone sees them. Instead, it takes a few engagements with the customer, a few times seeing your brand name in different contexts, to get them to convert.
While that time investment can be intimidating, it can be helpful for boosting conversions in the long run and can help with customer loyalty as well.
Similarly, social media can help assist conversions that occur from other platforms since it already did the groundwork of creating brand affinity.
Average CPC rates from Facebook advertising vary greatly by industry, but generally average around $1.86 across the board.
Using Social and Email Advertising Together
When it comes down to it, the best advertising strategies will combine the strengths of different platforms in order to overcome the challenges you face on each of them.
An effective email advertising strategy will not only cause conversions from the email ad, but might also add those readers who click but don’t convert to a Facebook custom audience. Then, you can retarget those users, sharing important information they may need before they finally do convert.
If you’re ready to get serious about your email advertising strategy, it’s time to try Paved. With our all-in-one platform, you can find the right newsletters to advertise with, track verified performance metrics, and pay publishers, all in one place. Sign up for Paved today and see how easy email advertising can be.
