Email or social media: where should a small business spend its time?

Measured per person in the audience, email does far more. MailerLite's benchmarks, covering 3.6 million campaigns sent from 181,000 accounts between December 2024 and November 2025, put the average click rate at 2.09% of recipients ¹. Mailchimp's figures, built from billions of emails and last updated in December 2023, put it at 2.62% ². By contrast, Socialinsider's 2026 benchmarks show the average Facebook post collecting reactions, comments and shares equal to 0.15% of the page's followers, and the average Instagram post about 0.45% ³. The metrics are not identical, and a click is a stronger action than a like, which only widens the gap.

Open rates look even better, at 43.46% on MailerLite ¹, but they are inflated because Apple Mail Privacy Protection marks emails as opened automatically, so clicks are the number to compare. Rates also vary by sector: software and web apps average a 1.15% click rate and e-commerce 1.07% ¹, so a product business should plan around the lower figures.

Small businesses report the same thing from experience. In Constant Contact's survey of 2,500 small business decision-makers in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US, run by Ascend2 Research in June 2025, 44% named email as their most effective marketing channel, up from 23% a year earlier ⁴. Constant Contact sells email software, so treat the trend with some care, but the same survey found 42% of small businesses have less than an hour a day for marketing ⁴, which makes per-hour return the thing that matters. Litmus's 2025 survey of marketing leaders adds a self-reported return: 35% said they get $10 to $36 back for every dollar spent on email, 30% $36 to $50 and 5% more than $50, while 21% don't measure it at all ⁵.

Email's limit is that it only reaches people who have already given you an address. That is the job social does well. Instagram says the majority of what people see in Reels comes from accounts they don't follow ⁶, which no newsletter can offer. The sensible split for a small team is to treat social as the top of the funnel and judge it by how many people it moves onto your list, rather than by likes.