1. Email marketing costs less than direct mail. You create one email message and design and send it to as few or as many people as appropriate, only incrementally increasing your costs. (The price you pay to your email service provider is literally pennies compared to what you’d pay for printing and postage of a direct mail piece!)

2. Email marketing tools are reusable. For example, you design an email template, then you can use it over and over.

3. Email marketing is cheaper to test than direct mail. With direct mail, the cost of printing a smaller quantity makes testing a financial challenge.

4. Email marketing can react within a day. A direct mail campaign can take weeks or even months to get from concept to finished and mailed piece. Reacting right away can have a huge impact on your marketing ROI.

5. Email marketing can be one-on-one yet still less expensive than telemarketing.

6. Email marketing is easier to track than any other marketing medium, allowing you to adjust and increase your response rates, and therefore email marketing ROI.

7. Email marketing is easier to defend. Reporting gives you hard facts to present to your boss.

Here’s wishing you a profitable Cyber Monday and holiday season!

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, 10% don’t invest at all, and more than half (52%) don’t increase their spending but keep it the same.

Chances are good, based on countless email marketing studies I’ve seen (as an email marketing vendor, it’s part of my job to keep up with them all), that the companies that invest more in email marketing yield better email marketing ROI. These are the companies that hire dedicated and experienced staff, make sure they’re working with the best email service provider (ESP) for the highest deliverability, integrate their email marketing platforms with their CRM systems, test and test and test, segment and segment and segment, and more.

In other words, they are the email marketers that will win in the overcrowded inbox because they are investing the time and money to do so.

Are you? Might be time for another look.

See the chart at: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/1news/chartofweek-08-12-08-lp.htm.