Your carefully crafted social media posts tend to reach just 3.2% of your followers on Instagram and 1.25% on Facebook . Email does considerably better: around 85% of emails land in the inbox , and the average newsletter open rate is 20.73% . To put it differently, if you have 1,000 Instagram followers and 1,000 newsletter subscribers, your Instagram post will reach about 30 of them. Your small business newsletter will land in about 850 inboxes—and 207 people will open it.

Reach is only the start. A newsletter also gives your small business three things social media can’t: a more intimate space, room for depth, and a lasting connection with your readers.

What A Small Business Newsletter Can Do That Social Media Can’t

Newsletters are more intimate

Posting on social media can feel like throwing confetti: some of it may reach your intended audience, much of it is lost in the wind. Signing up for a newsletter, however, requires the deliberate exchange of an email address. If your sign-up policies are ethical and up to code, people have explicitly chosen to invite you into what is generally a much smaller, more intimate virtual space than social media: their inbox .

Newsletters emphasize depth over fleetingness

While social media requires constant feeding, snappy texts and engaging images, newsletters allow for more depth. If the pace and fleetingness of social media are something you struggle with, writing an intentional, perhaps slightly longer newsletter can feel much more inspiring.

Newsletters also allow you to experiment with format more: instead of the grid’s image-plus-caption format, a newsletter can be all text, all image, all video, all audio—or a combination. In one newsletter, you can give a brief behind-the-scenes tour of your business and announce a new offer that customers can immediately click through to. You can capture customers’ experiences in image and text, easily adding more images without requiring people to swipe through a post. You can show much more depth and breadth, truly telling the story of your business and your offers.

Newsletters build community and loyalty

A good small business newsletter is more than just an announcement, or an attempt to sell something. A good newsletter tells a story, and forges a connection between the reader and the writer. People love stories—and stories can be very effective in your marketing too.

Stories create trust and community : especially in an age when many people are marketed to all the time, a genuine story, written by a real human, stands out. For example, it may not seem relevant for my business that newsletter readers remember that I have lots of houseplants—but it creates a connection that makes them remember me more easily (and leads to new clients who tell me “I love houseplants too!” all the time).

Your newsletter allows you to shape the story of your business. While (potential) customers may only rarely visit your website—sometimes just once or twice—a regular newsletter keeps your business top of mind as you tell them about new products and services as well as the story behind your business. This is what people tend to remember, and what fosters connection and loyalty: the values behind your business and what makes it unique. Experiences from former customers and clients help your readers to see that what you sell is for them. And how you share determines how they feel about your business: feelings that tend to last longer than facts about a business , and influence both whether people buy and what they’ll pay.

While a newsletter might take longer to create than a social media post, it is a marketing tool more than worth the effort—in addition to or instead of social media . With newsletters easier to set up than ever, there’s little reason not to send your first small business newsletter this month.