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Email List or Social Followers: Which One Brings Customers Back?
A follower count measures who might see a post if the platform allows it, while an email list measures who the business can reach directly, and for bringing past customers back, the second number is the one worth growing.
At a glance
- An owned list is the set of customers a business can contact directly, by email or consented text, without a platform deciding who sees the message; social followers are an audience the platform shows posts to selectively.
- Facebook told businesses in 2018 that it would show less public content from businesses and that Pages might see their reach and referral traffic decrease, while an email goes to every address on the list, subject only to spam filters and the customer's choice to open it.
- In an illustrative shop with 600 customers on its email list and 1,200 followers, a monthly email reaches nearly twice as many people as a post, worth about $7,560 a year in return visits against $4,032.
The number and where it comes from
The number that matters is reach per message, the share of an audience that actually sees what the business sends. For email, reach is set mostly by the customer, who decides whether to open; for social posts, it is set first by the platform, which decides how many followers see the post at all. When Facebook reworked its feed in January 2018 to favor friends and family, the company wrote that it would "show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses," and that Pages "may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease."
Email has measured, improvable numbers of its own. A field experiment published in Marketing Science, covering marketing emails sent by three companies to millions of people, found that adding the recipient's name to the subject line raised the share who opened from 9.05% to 10.80%, raised sales leads from 0.39% to 0.51% of recipients and lowered unsubscribes from 1.2% to 1.0%. Open rates vary widely with the list and the sender; the platform-wide average Mailchimp reported for campaigns sent to 1,000 or more subscribers was 35.63% as of December 2023, a figure the company notes may be affected by privacy features in some mail apps.
The owner's instinct is often We have 2,000 followers, so we don't need a list, when the more useful question is how many of those 2,000 saw last week's post; Instagram and Facebook both report "accounts reached" for each post, and that figure divided by followers is your own reach rate.
The calculation
| Input | Email list | Social followers | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audience | 600 past customers | 1,200 followers | Assumption |
| Share who see the message | 30% open | 8% reached | Assumption (check your email reports and post insights) |
| People who see it | 180 | 96 | Calculated |
| Share of viewers who book | 5% | 5% | Assumption (held equal to isolate reach) |
| Bookings per message | 9 | 4.8 | Calculated |
| Average visit | $70 | $70 | Assumption |
| Revenue per message | $630 | $336 | Calculated |
| Revenue per year, 12 messages | $7,560 | $4,032 | Calculated |
The booking rate is held equal on purpose, so the gap comes entirely from reach. In practice the booking rates will differ as well, since everyone on a customer list has already bought once, while a post can reach people who have never visited, which is the work social media does well.
None of this argues for abandoning social media. A study in the Journal of Marketing that linked customers' social media participation with their purchase records found that a company's own posts raised customer spending and worked best alongside email, so the practical setup uses posts to meet new people and a sign-up link in every profile to move them onto the list.
Email to customers comes with federal rules. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide requires a valid physical postal address in every commercial email, a working opt-out honored within ten business days and honest subject lines, with penalties of up to $53,088 for each email in violation. General information, not legal/tax/financial advice; talk to a licensed professional about your situation.
How you compare
- Reach: divide last month's average "accounts reached" per post by your follower count, then compare it with your email open rate. Whichever is higher is your stronger channel for reaching people you already know.
- List size: count customers who visited in the past year and the share of them with an email address on file.
- Benchmarks: the platform-wide average open rate Mailchimp reported was 35.63%; in the published field experiment, about one recipient in ten opened.
The first step is to find your two reach rates this week, one from your email reports and one from your post insights, and put them side by side before deciding where next month's hour goes.
Sources
- Meta. News Feed FYI: Bringing People Closer Together. January 2018.
- Sahni, N. S., Wheeler, S. C. and Chintagunta, P. Personalization in Email Marketing: The Role of Noninformative Advertising Content. Marketing Science 37(2), 2018. Field experiments at three companies, emails to millions of recipients.
- Mailchimp. Email Marketing Benchmarks and Metrics by Industry. Updated December 2023. Campaigns sent to at least 1,000 subscribers.
- Kumar, A., Bezawada, R., Rishika, R., Janakiraman, R. and Kannan, P. K. From Social to Sale: The Effects of Firm-Generated Content in Social Media on Customer Behavior. Journal of Marketing 80(1), 2016.
- Federal Trade Commission. CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business. Accessed October 2026.
Work with osNOVA on a customer list you own
We help owner-run service businesses collect email addresses at checkout, set up a simple monthly note to past customers and connect every social profile to the sign-up, so more of the people who already know you come back, and the weeks fill from your own list instead of the platform's choices.
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