In this age of Facebook and Twitter, you may be wondering why I consider email addresses so valuable.

The answer is simple: an email address gives you a direct line to your reader. It is the single most valuable piece of information and most valuable connection you can ever hope to have with visitors to your blog.

In this post I am going to explain why email is so valuable and why you should be collecting your visitors’ email addresses right now.

Email Is King

To put the power of email in perspective, let’s crunch the numbers when it comes to your Facebook feed (source):

• There are 1,500 ‘potential stories’ for you to see every time you login
• Those 1,500 are filtered down to just 300 by Facebook’s algorithms
• Only 70% of those 300 are actually read

Based upon the above numbers, if you have a Facebook page for your blog, you are likely to reach just 14% of the people who have ‘liked’ your page.

In reality, that number can be worse. Here’s a screenshot of a recent post I shared on the Facebook page of another blog of mine, Leaving Work Behind:

At the time of writing Leaving Work Behind’s Facebook page has 2,142 likes, yet the above post reached just 13% of them. And that was a pretty good post in terms of performance – other posts have received as few as 100 views.

According to a Socialbakers study of several thousand Facebook pages, 77% of pages’ reach in 2013 was achieved with Promoted (i.e. paid-for) posts. The simple fact is this: Facebook can no longer primarily be considered a free marketing channel.

The difficulties with Twitter are less complicated – a single tweet will reach only a fraction of your followers, as no one is on Twitter 24/7. Consider for example that despite me having around 15,000 followers, no more than 2,500 are online at any given time:

At best I’m reaching about 15% of my followers with every tweet, but in reality, they’re not all likely to be checking out every single tweet on their feed, even if they are ‘online.’

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for social media; it’s just way behind email in the pecking order.

The Power of Email

It’s as simple as this: if you get into someone’s inbox, they will see your email. They’ll need to acknowledge your message and take action on it (even if that action is to delete it). You’ve got a much better chance of being read if you’re in someone’s email inbox than if you’re on their Facebook or Twitter feed (if your message ever makes it that far).

Furthermore, you own your email list. It’s yours to use as you see fit. With premium solutions like AWeber, you can segment your list, split test emails, add and remove subscribers, email subscribers based upon custom criteria, and much more. Meanwhile, you have no control over Facebook’s and Twitter’s actions. They can impose new terms of service at any point.

Ultimately, you have no long-term control over how effective your reach is on those channels. While it may seem that Facebook and Twitter have been around forever, social media networks have historically enjoyed only brief shelf lives (remember MySpace?).

Email is here to stay; the same can’t be said of the current popular social media networks. Email is – and will continue to be – the most effective means of keeping in touch with your blog’s readers.

I trust I have convinced you why email addresses are so valuable to you as a blogger. Perhaps you already suspected as much, but have never figured out how on earth to get people to subscribe to your blog via email. Fortunately, we’ve got all the answers for you here at Beginner Blogging.

Photo Credit: Gajman