If mailing lists didn’t work, everywhere that we shop that asks for an email address, wouldn’t waste their time and money on sending out newsletters. A mailing list is a form of direct contact to your consumers (fans/customers/followers etc.) without the middle man of a social media platform.

When you communicate with your consumers directly via email you reach them without the clutter and distraction of other information around them. That means in an email there is no automatic next story, or post from someone beside, above or below. In an email you have to physically back out to get to the next email or precisely swipe to the next email.

On social media, the next persons content just can appear. For instance on Instagram, if you are watching a story the next story from someone else appears automatically. Now that content might be slightly more intriguing than yours, leaving the person to forget whatever you were promoting; or it may not be, but the person is just consuming so much information in a short amount of time that it’s so easy to forget what you just saw and were interested in. Especially when you don’t have the swipe up option on your account for immediate action to be taken. On Twitter there is so much information now that you can even see peoples likes on your regular timeline that you can get lost in a rabbit hole by clicking on just one thread. This can apply to all other platforms, it’s so easy to get distracted on social media because there is so much content in your face with visuals. Emails are typically text heavy, so when you send out visual e-blasts, people have a better chance of grasping your content and retaining it.

Now lets move on to the darker side of not having a mailing list. This year alone the entire Facebook network has crashed multiple times. That includes Instagram, the network has been down for nearly an entire day each time. Now imagine this happening on a day where you are launching something, how are you going to communicate that to your consumers when you are relying on a third party app to connect with your audience. Every social media platform we use is a middle man for our communication. There is no guarantee that they will last forever. Any one of the platforms could just close their doors one day, now what? You lost access to thousands of people you thought you had in the palm of your hands.

Just think about it, we have seen vine come and go, more and more people losing interest in snapchat, myspace is a ghost town, facebook is frowned upon and lets be real, most of us only still have it because we need it to convert our Instagram to a business account.

Don’t be at the mercy of a third party app, create a mailing list. On that note, join my mailing list below so you don’t miss out on a future posts, one of which I’ll go over what to include in your newsletters, how often to send them and what platforms I recommend to keep your mailing list organized. Also for signing up, you will receive a Brand Guide and a Social Media Post Ideas Guide, created by myself to help you get started with your brand.

Sidenote: If you are a numbers person and want to know the data behind email marketing check out this article by OptinMonster.

Related article: What to Include In Your Newsletter and How Often You Should Send Them