In order to decide which one of these two marketing strategies is more important to your business, you have to understand first the difference between these two strategies.

When you do email marketing you are trying to capture your customers' leads in order to be able to follow up with them in the future via emails.

Email marketing puts you in contact with people who already know you. That’s why the number of people you are reaching through email marketing is limited. This means that this strategy is unscalable!

With Facebook ads, things are different because with Facebook ads you can either :

This means that with Facebook ads you have no limits since you have infinite possibilities to reach new audiences. This means that this strategy is scalable!

Since with email marketing you are only getting in touch with people who already know you, this means that your return on investment will be huge!!

Especially that the cost you pay monthly for your email provider can be as low as 200$ per month!

When it comes to Facebook ads things are different because you need to pay as long as you want your ads to be live. This means that each time you want to bring your customer back to your store you need to pay for the ads.

That’s why the return on investment for Facebook ads is always lower for the one of email marketing.

Email marketing is always way cheaper and more profitable than Facebook ads. However, it is limited and not scalable.

With email marketing, you are capturing your customers' leads and you are building up your own customers' list. This means that you will be in touch with your customers directly without the need for any other 3rd party platform.

Email marketing allows you much more flexibility and puts you in control of how and when to connect to your audience.

Not only that, with email marketing, you can build up a very strong connection with your customers, because you are connecting with them through emails, not through ads!

Many people don’t like to see ads and don’t like to interact with them, so when it comes to user experience and how much your connection with your audience is strong, email marketing wins.

When it comes to ads you are always relying on a 3rd party platform like Facebook or Instagram.

So if you are selling a product that doesn’t fit exactly facebook policy, Facebook will not allow you to advertise for this product. In this case, you will be left with one option and it is to use your email list to market and sell your product.

In addition to that Facebook and Instagram are platforms that you don’t own. This means that if Facebook one day decides to disable your ad account you would be left without any traffic source.

Facebook and Instagram are very good traffic sources but they shouldn’t be your only traffic sources so my advice for you is to never rely entirely on them!

So as a simple answer to this question "they are both extremely important".

However, you can run a business without running Facebook ads but it’s very hard to succeed without email marketing.

Let me explain this a little bit more. Running Facebook ads is one way to bring traffic to your store but it’s not the only way. There are many other methods you can use to drive traffic to your store and many of them are free.

However, without email marketing, it is very difficult to retain your old customers and increase your customer's life-long value.

My Top recommendation for you is to decide depending on your business current status and stage: