An email list beats social followers, and here is the arithmetic
Followers are a number a platform lets you see. A list is an asset you own. The difference shows up the day an algorithm changes.
5 min read · by the Mule Digital team
A business with 400 email subscribers reaches more customers next Tuesday than a business with 8,000 Instagram followers. This is not a motivational opinion. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is not close.
The numbers
Organic reach on a business social account is somewhere around 2 to 6 percent of followers on a good day, and the platform decides which day is good. Eight thousand followers is maybe 300 people who see a post, if the algorithm is in the mood.
A plain email campaign to an engaged list opens at 35 to 50 percent. Four hundred subscribers is around 170 people who see the message, in their inbox, because you decided to send it. Not because a ranking model decided your post deserved distribution that hour.
Who owns the connection
You do not own your followers. You rent access to them, and the landlord changes the rent without telling you. Anyone who ran a Facebook page through 2014, or a TikTok account through any algorithm shift since, has paid that rent.
An email list is a file you can export. If Mule Mail disappeared tomorrow, you would download a CSV and keep going. Try exporting your Instagram following.
What to actually do
Put a signup form where people already are: the footer, the thank-you page, the bottom of the one blog post that gets traffic. Ask for the email and one useful thing in return. Send something worth opening on a schedule you can keep. Twelve good emails a year beats forty you resent writing.
Keep posting socially if it works for you. Just stop calling rented reach an audience. The audience is the list.
Set up the four records once. Send for years.
Mule Mail writes the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for you and verifies them before your first send.
Try it free