According to McKinsey, email marketing is 40 times more effective for customer acquisition than social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

I believe it.

In overseeing countless email campaigns I’ve seen that an email can generate far more interest and response than social posts targeted to many times more people. After all, your social “followers” may not be very representative of your target market. And Facebook is showing brand posts to far fewer people than two or three years ago — unless the brand pays to sponsor them; Adweek reported a year ago that the average reach for a brand post on Facebook is less than 3 percent.

I have over 5,000 followers on Twitters, but few are potential clients. My tweets fly by them, buried in a stream of competing content.

That’s why more and more brands are advertising and promoting their posts on Facebook and other social channels, because the organic reach is so ineffective.

If you grow your own email lists of qualified individuals and develop a reputation for sending only valuable content, you can consistently get open rates above 20 percent and high levels of interaction. But if you buy a list (which your competitors are buying, too) and spam it with garbage, your email campaigns will wither and die.

Use email well and you can get great results from it.

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