Newsletters are a time-honored marketing tradition, since long before the days of email. Organizations from multinational retail chains to your local mom-and-pop bakery have used them to educate, inform, and sell to their customers for decades.

Today, with shrinking consumer attention spans and a general industry shift toward short-form social media content, it can be easy to dismiss the newsletter as an old school marketing tool. But I’m here to tell you that sending newsletters can be as valuable, if not more, as posting to your Facebook page when it comes to building relationships with leads and customers. With today’s email newsletter software, creating and sending professional newsletters is a breeze.

There are over five billion email accounts in existence. It’s an incredibly efficient marketing channel for not only building brand trust but growing and managing customer relationships. For a while, there was a dip in email marketing popularity as social media became the channel of choice. Data from the past five years, however, demonstrates that email marketing is making a significant comeback.