If you’re a business owner who has spent some time in online circles, you would have heard the phrase ‘you must build your mailing list’ a few times. You might wonder why, as it’s just another thing to add to the mountain of things you have to do for your business already.

You’re probably on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, have a website, a blog and you might think that’s enough, especially because it takes up a big chunk of your time and energy to create content for each of these platforms. I’m hoping to convince you otherwise and start your list because I really do believe it’s the biggest asset a business can build, dare I say that it’s even more important than being on social media.

Yes, I really said that! Building your email subscriber list is more important than being on social media.

I’m sharing 3 big reasons why it’s so important to start building your mailing list:

Email is still more popular than social media

Email has been around for much longer than social media and is more widely used, in other words more people are using email than social media.You might find this hard to believe, but it’s true.

Better Engagement

Engagement via email is much higher than on social media. This probably won’t surprise you, knowing that not everyone who likes your Facebook page will see your content, and twitter streams almost go at the speed of light so it’s hard to keep up.

The return on investment (ROI) is also much higher on email, most likely because emails are harder to ignore than social media and you have been personally invited into someone’s inbox, meaning that they actually WANT to hear from you.

Here’s a very impressive statistic from the Direct Marketing Association, who have researched ROI on email marketing and state that email marketing has an ROI of about 4300%. Can’t really beat that statistic I say!

Email is personal

Firstly, it needs to be said that you can convey your message much better in an email than in a 140 character post. Simply because you can write much more in an email and you can make it more personal by speaking directly to your audience, include pictures, highlight fonts, and format your email so it looks good.

Through nifty bits of code you can add a person’s name to the email and if you really want to get personal you can segment your lists, which means that you can create separate lists according to people’s interest and write to them only about their interests (how’s that for getting personal!).

Also, email was made for business whereas social media networks are exactly that; they’re made for social engagement. Emails were created so that you could send someone a personal message in a faster way than snail mail, social media was created for social relationships but not necessarily personalised messaging.

Remember that people buy from people first and foremost, so making sure you write from the heart and make it personal helps with building stronger relationships.

I hope I’ve planted a little seed to make you consider building your list; it really is the best way forward for your business.

You might be asking ‘how to do I build my email list’?

Well you’ve come to the right place.