As it often turns out, trying to make the most of all options that are available to you produces better results than just picking the most convenient one. Simply put, conducting an extensive email marketing campaign doesn’t prevent you from connecting with your audience on social media. In fact, doing both things at the same time will probably generate the biggest increase in revenue streams.

On the other hand, neglecting either of these online marketing techniques can be a costly mistake. However, the statistics clearly show that the significance of email marketing for the success of online marketing campaigns might be underestimated. Here are just a few reasons why email marketing is still more effective than using social media for the promotion of your products and services.

The Size of The Audience

The number of email users worldwide has been steadily rising at the rate of 3% per year since 2016 and by the end of 2019, it could reach 2.9 billion. That is almost the third of the world’s population, and more than 90% of the people check their email daily. Facebook, currently the largest social media platform has 2.23 billion active monthly users, while WhatsApp or Instagram are well below the 2 billion plateau. These numbers indicate that email marketing offers a larger pool of potential customers than social media platforms.

Choosing Who Sees Your Marketing Messages

There is no way to control who sees your posts or ads on Facebook or Twitter, and that’s why the messages you share on social media have to be optimized for a wider audience. Email lists let you target only a particular demographic, so you can tailor your marketing messages to reflect the values and interests of the target group you’re addressing. Besides, the open and click-through rates for email marketing are much higher than on social media, since only 0.07% of people will actually click on a Facebook ad to learn more about a product.

Email Marketing Offers a Better Organic Reach

Making sure that your marketing messages reach their target is undoubtedly important, but there is only so much you can do, as online marketers have no control over who is going to view their messages. Relying on the email marketing techniques can increase the chances of reaching your potential clients because 79% of people actually get your emails. Facebook’s organic reach has dropped to 1-6%, and in the best case scenario, only 6% of your followers and fans will see your posts. Getting the users of social media platforms to like or share your posts is much more difficult than making sure your emails don’t end up in the Spam box.

Better Return of Investment

Marketers across all industries agree that the Return of Investment is the best way to determine how effective a marketing approach is. A study conducted a couple of years ago showed that email marketing improves the ROI more than any other form of online promotion. The median ROI for email is 122%, and social media has the second best median ROI of 28%.

Despite the impressive ROI results email marketing can offer that is not its most important aspect, the lead generation is. The reason for this can be found in the fact that clients acquired through email have a 12% longer lifetime value than those obtained through social media channels. Conversion Rates are also frequently cited as a part of the reason why marketers choose to employ the email marketing strategy.

Email Marketing is Here to Stay

Over the years we’ve heard a lot about the death of email marketing, but a brief look at the statistics will reveal that it is still an effective strategy. Social media platforms can offer more exposure to your products because your fans can share the content you post, however, this doesn’t necessarily lead to better lead generation or conversion rates because views on social media don’t directly translate to sales.

Opting for just one online marketing strategy and disregarding all the others will rarely produce the kind of result you were hoping for. Merging two techniques or more into a strong social media campaign and using social media to increase the number of subscribers to your email list, will certainly help you improve the sales of your products.

Marios Italos is the founder of EmailVerifier.com a product of Intergo Interactive Ltd, a Cyprus-based creator of award-winning SaaS technology products.