I’m really leaning into the whole January situation, and I spent my weekend alternating between reading and baking. First, I finished off Rachel Slade’s Making It in America (there’s a review on my blog) and then started on Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, which is about how algorithms have flattened culture.
You know I love to dunk on algorithmic feeds like IG (and for that matter, Faire) so of course I’ve got things to say.
I was reading Filterworld this morning when this line about Instagram jumped out at me:
“That… feels like a broken promise for a social network that was premised on democratized, user-generated content. We users are what makes social media run, and yet we also aren’t given full control over the relationships we develop on the platforms, in large part because algorithmic recommendations are so dominant.”
This has always been my beef with Instagram (and any other social media platform). You don’t own your audience and you have no control over what gets seen by whom. And not only is it harder than ever to reach your audience, but you could lose access to them altogether if your account gets hacked or if a social media platform decides you’ve violated their (ever-changing) terms of service.
This is why I still emphasize email marketing, even in 2024. (Especially in 2024.)
Now, I understand that email marketing is still subject to some algorithmic whims, especially with Google’s addition of the “Promotions” tab. But I only have to take a quick glance at my numbers to see how much more of my audience my email marketing reaches.
I recently had an Instagram video do fairly well. No, it didn’t go viral, but it was viewed by around 25% percent of my audience. But that’s the exception, not the rule. Most of my videos on IG reach 5% to 10% of my audience (on a good day) and I’m lucky if an image-based post reaches 1% to 2%.
Contrast this with my email list, where my open rates typically average between 35% and 40%. (And this is on the low side for email marketing. I know some people who frequently hit the 50% to 60% range.)
Even though my list is smaller than my number of followers on social media, when I do the math, more people are opening my emails than seeing my social posts. (And that number doesn’t reflect people who see an email but don’t open it, which is still a form of marketing and name recognition. As I write in my book, simply seeing your name in their inbox may prime someone to take action in the future.)
I’m not telling you this to encourage you to quit social media (though you can if you want) or to shame you for your social media usage. Instead, I want to encourage you to bring email marketing into the mix as well.
Building an email list can help buffer you from the whims of social media, and if you email your list regularly, you can reach even more people than a typical social media post.
I’ve often argued that social media commands a disproportionate amount of our marketing attention for an often questionable rate of return. It feels like we have to make more and more complex content just to show up in our follower’s feeds.
But the beauty of email marketing is that you can get more reach with less effort. The email strategy I’ve been promoting for years (the one I share in my book) involves sending one simple email every week. This is an email that takes no more time to put together than a social post (possibly even less if you’ve become accustomed to sharing complex videos) and has the potential to reach a higher percentage of your audience.
So the next time you find yourself frustrated with how little of your social media audience actually sees your posts, remember that email marketing is still a reliable way to reach more of your audience.
My book, The Artists and Profit Makers Guide to Email Marketing, covers everything you need to create a simple system for connecting with your audience through email marketing.