Who will win the future? Email or Social Media?

Thinking ahead of our discussion on email marketing without knowing the dominant mechanism, I had made the assumption that email marketing was the antiquated & dying breed of the two forums. Surprisingly, after researching, email is the clear winner in terms of conversion rates, Click Through, and ROI.

To offer more color, I am an avid 'unsubscriber' of marketing emails. I absolutely cringe when I receive marketing emails from retailers. My aversion to this lead me to the conclusion that everyone would have a similar reaction to them- but clearly that is not the case. The surprising factor was perhaps not that email was the winner but by how much it was the winner. Here are some reasons why:
-Email is more far reaching. Although people engage in a multitude of social media sites/platforms (instagram, facebook, twitter, youtube, etc), email is more broad. It isn't linked to particular demographics therefore the accessibility is wider for marketing B2C and B2B.
-McKinsey found that email is 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.
-It turns out that 60% of consumers subscribe to a brand’s email list to receive promotional messages compared to 20% of consumers who will follow brands on social media to get deals.-Its becoming harder on social media for organic reach causing engagement to drop. When facebook and instagram evolve their methodologies of feeds, it can effect the durability of a marketing campaign.

Conclusion
It's clear that email is not going anywhere, nor is social media so for any successful marketing campaign, especially for online only retailers, a combination of both is the way to go.