Email marketing or social media, which one do you use most to promote your business?
I will happily admit that I am biased toward email marketing. I mean, obviously, it’s what I do for a living.
There are several reasons I feel this way. And not all of them are about dunking on social media. I honestly believe they’re both part of a solid, overall marketing ecosystem. But email marketing has advantages that social media does not.
For example…
You Own Your Email List
When someone downloads your lead magnet or signs up for your email newsletter, they are giving you permission to contact them directly. Meaning, they are giving you the key to enter that most sacred of places, their inbox.
By opting in, they have specifically said they’re interested in what you are offering and want to support the mission you have set for your company.
To be fair, you can run a group or a have community of followers on social media, but you don’t own that platform. That following can be yanked away from you at any moment by a change in the algorithms, over which you have no control.
Or, worse yet, if you’re in the midst of a launch and the platform goes down, how do you reach those people to let them know what you’re doing? I know business owners who have had this happen. It is traumatic, to say the least.
You have full control over your email list, even if you don’t have full control over when major systems go down. It’s a lot easier to resend an email to explain what happened, knowing it will actually end up in your subscribers’ inboxes, instead of posting frantically on social media, praying that your followers see it as they scroll through their feeds.
There’s also the issue of losing your social media account. Because yes, that happens. Any of these platforms have the ability, and the right, to shut you down for seemingly no reason at all.
Or worse yet, having your social media accounts hacked and taken over. This happened to one of my clients and it was bad. They lost access to everything they’d built, their organic audience, their ad campaigns, all of it. They’re still dealing with the fallout from this, 2 years later.
With email marketing, if something goes drastically wrong with your email service provider, or (heaven forfend) your entire business, you still have that list of names and email addresses that you can pick up and take somewhere else to start over. It may take some work to get up and running again, but you’re not starting from zero.
Your Reach on Social Media Keeps Shrinking
Gone are the days when you could quickly and easily build a business on organic social media posting or paid social media ads. Social media algorithms now show your posts and ads more often to people who have no idea who you are than to people who follow you on a given platform.
While that can be great for exposure to new audiences, it doesn’t help you sell your product or service to a total stranger. You know as well as I do that most customers don’t come to your website or business ready to buy. You have to develop a relationship with them. A post or ad flashing by in their feed isn’t going to do that.
Here are some recent stats.
According to The Kirk Group, your organic Facebook posts reach 1-2% of your followers as of January 2026. That’s down from 5% in 2018 and 16% in 2012. The average engagement on Facebook is around 0.15% according to Social Insider.
Creatorflow cited Hootsuite’s report from February 2026 stating that Instagram’s reach dropped from 12% to 6% for accounts with under 100,000 followers. And Outfame’s recent organic Instagram engagement report says that “The average Instagram post reaches just 3.5% of followers in 2025-2026, down from 10-15% in 2020.”
Average email open rates still hover between 20% and 25%.
More people see your emails and actually engage with them regularly than see your organic social media posts.
This comparison extends to paid social media ads too.
Paid social media advertising returns somewhere between $1.50 and $5 for every dollar spent, depending on platform and campaign quality. Which can be wide ranging, depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to.
Meanwhile, email marketing still maintains returns of $36 to $42 for every dollar spent. That average has been consistent for at least the last 5 years, despite all of the changes to deliverability and privacy settings.
That’s a 7x to 28x advantage for email marketing, before you factor in that you actually own your email list, as mentioned earlier.
The Difference Between Screaming Into the Void and Having a Conversation
I always like to compare scrolling through your social media feed to a noisy club. Everyone is bumping into you, there’s loud, thumping music and people are sloshing their drinks everywhere. There’s so much going on, it’s impossible to focus on one person and actually have any meaningful communication with them.
Conversely, I like to compare email marketing to someone inviting you into their living room for a cup of tea and a chat. It’s intimate. It’s a one-on-one conversation. You have this person’s undivided attention and they want to focus on you.
That’s what all of this is about. You started your business because you want to serve your people. You want to make the world a better place, even if it’s just your little corner of it. You want to welcome the people who want this same vision, who support the outcome you’re working toward, into your community, where you can talk to them directly.
Email marketing lets you build the relationship between you and your subscribers on a more personal level. It helps you build your Know, Like, and Trust factor. And it gives you the place to share your mission, vision, and values with like-minded people.
Taking the time to build that relationship is what results in sales, continued support, and achieving your stated mission.
Email Marketing Lets You Just Be You
Social media platforms are built on engagement. You have to constantly be “on” and competing with everyone and everything around you. It rewards controversy and outrage. And as much as everyone says they’re being “authentic” on social media, many of them are performing for the algorithms to get all the attention they can attract.
Email marketing lets you be your genuine, authentic self. You can take that deep dive into a topic that matters to you, and your subscribers will go with you. You don’t have to compete with the latest fad or news flash. You can share, and live your values on your terms with people who want to know more about, and support those values, as well as you and your business.
Email Marketing Makes You More Visible in AI Search
In a round-about sort of way, to be fair.
As I’ve mentioned in past issues, more people are using AI for online search. They do it directly by asking Claude or ChatGPT to search for them. (For example, I asked Claude to find some of the articles I’ve cited in this piece.) They also do it indirectly because search engines now put AI search results at the top of their pages.
In a world where AI is in charge of discovering sources, the channels you fully control matter more, not less. AI doesn’t index your email list. Your private emails to subscribers aren’t searchable. But your email subscribers are the people who:
- Read your blog posts and share them, which signals to AI that your content is worth citing.
- Nominate your site as a Google Preferred Source, which gives you a labeled badge inside AI answers and reportedly doubles your click-through rate.
- Mention you in their own newsletters, podcasts, and conversations, which is the diffuse pattern AI engines parse to figure out who’s authoritative in a niche.
In other words, AI search doesn’t see your email list directly. But AI search sees the world your email list helps you build. Your subscribers are the engine that makes you findable in the AI era, even though the emails you send them are private.
Compare this to social media followers. Their engagement with your posts mostly stays trapped inside your chosen platform’s algorithm. They can’t easily nominate you as a Preferred Source without doing a lot of work. The platforms themselves are in active legal battles with AI companies over training data, which makes the future of social content in AI search uncertain.
The channel you own is the one AI search rewards indirectly. The channels you don’t are getting less visible at the same time.
I’m Not Saying Social Media Is Dead
Far from it. Social media is still a great place to get found by new people and even to stay in touch with people who know you.
But it shouldn’t be your only marketing channel.
Social media is (and in my opinion always has been) a great way to build your email list. Find them on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or whatever other channels you use to promote your business. Then invite them into your own email ecosystem, where you can talk to them more directly.
This is how I use social media for my business. I promote this newsletter on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, then I link back to each issue on my website. (I do publish this newsletter on LinkedIn, but it’s still delivered directly into the inboxes of people who subscribe via LinkedIn.)
And I have openly admitted that I use AI to write many of those social media posts because it saves me a ton of time. I’m okay with it because I’m using the newsletter itself as my source material. It’s still my writing and I edit every single post before it goes out.
You can do this for your business too. Encourage your social media followers to join your email list, however you decide to do it.
Then, instead of measuring engagement and follower growth, you can measure how many subscribers join your email list, and better yet, how many become customers over time.
Social media may like to think it’s the end-all and be-all for marketing your business, but it’s just one piece of what should be a much larger ecosystem that serves your people at all levels, in all the places they can find you.
I’d love to hear how you’re using social media and email marketing in your business. Comment below or send me an email and let me know. I may have some additional tips for you. For that matter, you may have some insights I haven’t thought of or come across.
Finally, today’s images are from my most recent beach walk. And yes, I will use them to promote this issue of the Email Marketing Ecosystem newsletter on social media, so I can grow my email list.
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