If you want to build relationships, don’t forget the power of email marketing. Consumers may be addicted to social media but that doesn’t make it the best relationship marketing channel. While social is great for brand discovery and content sharing, it is an unreliable way to continually speak to your customers.

Even if someone goes so far as to like your Facebook page, essentially saying that they want to hear from you, there is no guarantee that they will see your message because of Facebook’s algorithms. A Facebook user could see something like 15,000 things in their newsfeed at any given time, so the social media user may never see all of the content shared by their friends and the fan pages they like. Facebook uses an algorithm to figure out the best content for each user. If somebody likes your brand’s Facebook page they only have a 6.5 percent chance of actually seeing one of your posts each time it comes out. So even though that consumer has liked you and told you that they want to hear from you, they won’t necessarily get every message that you put out there. The same is not true with email.

As long as you have a good deliverability score, if a consumer opts into your list, the chances are they are going to get your content in their inbox. This relationship is a lot more valuable because instead of catching you when they happen to be in their social news feed, your message exists in the inbox where consumers check all of their messages.

Read more: The power of email marketing for building relationships