Social media marketing is all the rage. With the rise of many alternates to the mighty Facebook, advice for direct marketing has gravitated towards these social platforms to get your message out to the masses. When you’re spending time and energy on your social media accounts, it’s easy to let your email marketing efforts lapse. That’s a mistake. While SEO strategies call for a high profile on as many social media platforms as you can manage, direct email marketing is still the number one way to keep people interested in your brand, and to turn readers into customers. Here are three reasons to use email marketing to build your business, put together in conjunction with UK Business Lists:

It Cultivates One on One Relationships

If you receive a letter in the Post addressed to your name, you’re very likely to open it and read it. If you receive a letter addressed to Occupant, it’s very likely to end up in the bin unread. It’s the same with digital communications. Social media sites are like an auditorium full of people, all talking at the same time. Direct marketing by email is a one on one conversation. Potential customers like the feeling that you’re giving them personal attention, and targeted email messages deliver pertinent information tailored to the reader instead of a dump of pictures and text that tries to appeal to everyone.

Don’t Be Fooled By the Slowdown in Email Traffic

Marketers have been told that email traffic is way down, while social media traffic has skyrocketed. That’s true, but doesn’t mean what it appears to. People have stopped using email for personal communications with their friends and family. Social media sites and texting has replaced email almost entirely for casual correspondence. That explains the drop in email traffic. What’s happened at the same time is that customers have come to expect all commercial communications to be handled by email. Consumers expect real businesses to correspond with them by email, which has mostly replaced snail mail.

Email Marketing Converts

It’s hard to measure engagement on social media sites. There’s really only one way to measure the success of marketing plans, and that’s to see how many people press the button and make a purchase at the end of an offer. By that metric, email marketing is not only the king; it’s the king of kings. According to research conducted by ecommerce analytics experts, sales from email marketing have increased four-fold in the last five years. That proves that email marketing is here to stay, and is more important than ever.