Take a moment to think about your average day. If you’re like many other marketers, a good chunk of your time is probably spent on social media – writing status updates, creating ads, monitoring your mentions, replying to wall posts, etc.

Now, take a moment to think about the time you spend on email marketing – growing your list, crafting great email content, and looking at analytics on your list growth and engagement.

If you find you’re spending a majority of your time on social media, and little to no time on your email list, it could be a potentially tragic mistake that could be costing you sales. Here’s why.

Just the stats: users, open rates, and click through rates.
With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users per month and Twitter boasting 255 million, we certainly couldn’t blame you for being persuaded to focus a large portion of your marketing efforts on social media.

But what you don’t see so frequently touted are the statistics on email usage. According to Radicati, the total number of worldwide email accounts was 3.9 billion in 2013, and projected to be 4.9 billion by 2017.

To put this in perspective for you, there are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined.

From a marketing perspective though, it’s the statistics on reach and engagement that show the real story. Did you know that organic reach on Facebook (I.e. the number of your fans who actually see your posts in their Newsfeed) is only 6%?

On the contrary, open rates for email marketing messages are generally in the 20 – 30% range, meaning your message is 5x more likely to be seen through email than Facebook.

Similarly, click through rates from email are generally in the 3% range, while click-through rates on Tweets are generally in the 0.5% range. This means you are 6x more likely to get a click-through from email than you are from Twitter.

In order to show this in action, influential marketing blogger Derek Halpern ran a test where he sent his latest blog post to the same number of people via both email and Twitter. Here are the results:

300 people clicked through to the article from Twitter
4,200 people clicked through to the article from email
But is it easier to build a social media following than an email list?
While it’s clear email has a much better engagement and response rate than social media, you may be thinking that it’s much more difficult to get people to give you permission to email them as opposed to get them to become a fan on Facebook or become a follower on Twitter.

But that’s not the case.

Always a fan of testing, Derek Halpern did an experiment to see which would be harder: getting people to subscribe to his email list, or getting people to follow him on Twitter. You would think people are more likely to click a follow button than give up their email address. But you would be mistaken.

In his experiment, he sent 1,000 visitors to his email opt-in page, and 1,000 visitors to his Twitter page. The results? He received almost 500 new email subscribers, making it a conversion rate of almost 50%. While he doesn’t give the exact number of Twitter followers he gained, he did say it was no where near 500 new followers and that the Twitter page underperformed significantly compared to the opt-in page.

In the same piece, he goes on to talk about different ways you can grow your email list successfully and how one of his readers got a 500% increase in the number of people subscribing to their list each day just by putting opt-in forms in the right places on their website. That’s a significant increase, and best of all it was a one time thing that doesn’t require devoting an hour or two a day to creating, participating in, and monitoring discussions.