No one can argue with the value that email marketing offers to businesses today. For one, the vast majority of your audience has an email address, making email marketing an effective way to reach your audience. Did you know that 91 percent of American consumers actually like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with?

Email marketing builds credibility for your business, improves communication, strengthens relationships, and drives traffic to your website. In short, using email to promote your business delivers results. And, by being able to easily track the performance of your campaigns, you can make tweaks when necessary to maximize results.

If one social media platform is going to give email marketing a run for its money, though, it will be Facebook. As of November 2016, 79 percent of online adults use Facebook. This social media channel gives marketers a large pool of consumers to connect and engage with. While marketers have a difficult time getting consumers to open their emails, they have less businesses to compete with when using Facebook Messenger to deliver content.

While email marketing is still the preferable choice, here are three ways that Facebook messenger is competing with email:

1. Offers less content to compete with.
The average person receives 88 emails each day. That’s a lot of email to sift through, and many of these emails are either marked as junk or deleted.

On the other hand, marketers have yet to fully embrace Facebook messenger. Because the average person receives considerably less Facebook messages per day than emails, there is less content competing for their attention. This makes it more likely that a recipient would open your Facebook message and take action.

2. Sparks engagement, particularly with an in-person event.
If your business is hosting an in-person event, the attendees are typically off of their phones and in networking mode. The challenge is that if you need to send them important information regarding the event, they’re probably not checking their emails.

Facebook messenger, on the other hand, can be used to send real-time announcements. A best practice is to create a Facebook messenger scan code where event attendees can scan the code with their mobile devices and immediately begin receiving real-time information and updates about the event.

3. Replaces the need for lead generation forms.
When sending out an offer in an email, the recipient needs to click the link and is then directed to a landing page on the website to claim the offer.

If you run Facebook advertising campaigns, it makes sense to use Facebook messenger to serve as the form. The message would ask recipients a few questions that would typically be included in a form and would then provide a link to the content within the message. This simplifies the lead generation process and helps to reduce the overall cost per lead.

Again, we’re not saying that Facebook messenger should replace email marketing. Instead, think of Facebook messenger as an out-of-the-box tool that you can use to serve your audience with content, spark engagement, and earn conversions.