A new study has revealed that consumers prefer email marketing to being contacted via social media networks, financial-news.co.uk reports.

Marketing is a very important consideration for anyone who is about to start a franchise or launch a new product – doing it well can increase awareness of and engagement with a brand, all leading to healthy sales. What’s more, there is a plethora of marketing channels out there to help get a message across.

However, technology consultancy Portal has discovered that the majority of consumers prefer their interactions with a company to be done through email and not – as previously thought – through the likes of Facebook or Twitter.

Just two per cent of the 500 British consumers polled said that they liked to maintain contact with a business through social media networks. While 19 per cent said they would rather speak to someone on the telephone, more than half of the respondents said their preferred method was email.

Contrary to popular belief, email’s popularity has grown in the last two years, despite greater numbers of people and businesses joining social media networks. A similar poll in 2010 placed email at the top and it was crowned winner again in 2011. Furthermore, when the same question was posed to businesses, a third chose email while just three per cent opted for social media.

Portal CEO Shamus Kelly told smallbusiness.co.uk: “We suspect that social media platforms aren’t taking off as favoured customer service channels because, more often than not, complaints are too complex to explain in a short post.

“Our experience is that consumers turn to platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as a last resort, using them as platforms to publicly condemn a brand following a frustrating experience, rather than a first port of call.”