Two numbers, the same person on the receiving end. The first is 21%. That is roughly the share of your email subscribers who open a typical send. The second is 3%. That is roughly the share of your social followers who see a typical post.
Same audience size. Different surface. Seven times the reach on email.
Both numbers move year to year. Both have moved in the same direction for a decade. Email open rates have held. Social organic reach has fallen by an order of magnitude. The gap is now wide enough that the two channels should be measured on different yardsticks.
The headline numbers
Email opens. Across MailerLite's industry benchmarks, the headline average is in the low-40s, but Apple Mail Privacy Protection auto-loads tracking pixels and inflates that number by 15 to 20 points. The conservative read on actual human opens is closer to 20-25%. Call it 21%.
Social reach. Sprout Social's 2026 organic reach summary puts Facebook at roughly 5.9% of followers per post and Instagram closer to 3.5%. Other reporting puts Facebook business pages under 2.2%. Average across platforms and post types and remove anything boosted, and 3% is the honest round number.
A 10,000-person email list reaches roughly 2,100 humans per send. A 10,000-follower social account reaches roughly 300 humans per post. Same audience size, two different products.
What "reach" means in each context
The word reach is doing a lot of work, and the two surfaces measure it differently.
Email reach is delivery plus open. The message arrives in the inbox; the recipient sees the sender and the subject and chooses whether to engage. An open is closer to a real acknowledgment than an impression.
Social reach is appearance in a feed. The post is technically rendered on a screen, somewhere in a scroll, with a fraction of a second of visual attention before the thumb keeps moving. The dashboard reports it as "reach" but it is closer to a billboard impression than a delivered message.
Even if the numbers were the same, the qualities would not be. They are not the same; the cheaper-to-deliver channel is also the one with the higher quality of attention.
Why social organic reach keeps falling
Three reasons, all structural.
Feed order is algorithmic. The platform decides what to show, not the calendar. Its incentive is to maximize time on the platform, not delivery of any one creator's post. Outbound links cost the platform a session; the algorithm has learned to weight them down.
Older relationships decay. A follower who liked a post in 2023 and went quiet is invisible to the algorithm by 2026. Engagement history is a recency signal. The cold half of every follower list barely counts toward reach for any given post.
Paid is winning. Facebook organic reach for business pages now sits under 2% on the conservative end. The deficit is the size of the paid promotion ladder, and that ladder is what the platforms sell. None of this is a mistake. It is how the product is supposed to work.
Why email open rates have held
Inbox order is mostly chronological. Gmail's tabs sort by category, but within a tab the messages are roughly in the order they arrived. There is no algorithm choosing whose newsletter to show today.
Email is also an open protocol. Mailgun, SendGrid, MailerLite, your homegrown setup, the inbox does not care which one sent the message. Nobody owns the rails. Nobody can raise the rent.
The result is that a well-maintained list has been opening at 20-25% for ten years. Inflated by MPP, deflated by Gmail bulk-sender enforcement, but bouncing in the same band. The pipe has not narrowed.
What this means in practice
A 10,000-person email list and a 10,000-follower social account are not the same audience. The numbers above turn one into a list of about 2,100 reachable humans per send; the other into about 300 viewable impressions per post.
The list is closer to "10,000 people you can reach." The follower count is closer to "10,000 people who once raised their hand and may never see you again."
This is why the same content placed on both surfaces produces dramatically different outcomes. Same headline, same offer, same audience size. One channel delivers it. The other gambles it on the algorithm.
It is also why a subscriber is worth roughly 10× a follower. The 7× reach gap, multiplied by the engagement gap and the conversion gap, compounds into an order of magnitude. The line-by-line math is in our piece on subscribers vs followers.
The strategic move
The right reading of these numbers is not "stop posting on social." Social is still where new attention starts. It is the discovery surface, not the relationship surface.
The right reading is: every social post needs an exit ramp to a list. A bio link that leads somewhere useful. A pinned comment with a free guide. A workshop signup. A subscribe page that loads in one tap.
Followers are an audience-of-record. Subscribers are an audience-you-can-reach. Different assets, measured by different metrics, owned by different parties. The strategic move is to keep using the first to feed the second.
The number that compounds is not follower count. It is the conversion rate from follower to subscriber.
Closing
Two surfaces, same person, very different odds of getting through. Email at 21%. Social at 3%. The seven-times reach gap is structural, driven by algorithms, paid pressure, and the slow decay of older follower relationships. It is durable.
Nashra is the publishing OS we built for this reality. Your subscriber list, newsletter, bio hub, and Magic Links run off the same spine, tagged at the source, wired to your automations from the moment they go live. So when a follower clicks the exit ramp off the social platform, the landing is already set up to convert them.
A subscriber converts roughly 10× better than a follower. Use the 3% surface to feed the 21% one.