Email continues to be a leading online marketing tool even with the competition from SMS, social media and all of the other new digital marketing options out there.
Why?
For starters it is the most cost effective method to reach prospects and interact with your existing customer base.
Done correctly, your email campaigns will not only generate a significant revenue stream but cement relations with your current and past customer or client list too.
The money is in the list.
Focusing on building a strong permission based “subscriber list” is one of the smartest strategies that a small business can have.
To give you an idea of the state of email today and to give you an idea just how valuable certain classes of subscribers are, we have pulled together some statistics that we think you'll find pretty interesting.
Who's Clicking What?
Here's a quick rundown on email list behavior:
- 51% of mature subscribers (people who joined the list over 3 months ago) have had some form of engagement (an open or a click) over a period of 12 months. 26% of that group have either opened or clicked recently meaning you can count on about a quarter of your “mature” subscribers to engage with any email you send.
- The industries that have the highest engagement rate of subscribers are retail apparel at 39%, publishing/general media 34%, travel at 31% and rounding out the group is general retail at 30%.
- The industries with the poorest engagement is led by (not surprisingly) pharmaceutical (can you spell Viagra) with a whopping 52% of subscribers considered dormant.
- 40% of B2B marketers consider leads generated from permission based lists as extremely high quality.
- Only 2% of marketers feel that email leads are “high cost.”
- Emails that are optimized for image blocking increase ROI by over 9%.
- 35% of business professionals check their email on a mobile device. Are your emails optimized for mobile?
- Over 44% of persons who received promotional email in the past 12 months made a purchase as a result of those emails. People who buy as a result of a promotional email spend 138% more than persons who are motivated to buy by other means. This stat alone should tell you the importance of email as it relates to the life time value of a customer.
Does email work for small businesses?
If you base success on the amount of money spent on it then the answer is yes.
A study sponsored by iContact reveals that SMBs spent more on email marketing than any other element of their marketing plan.
On average, SMBs spent 15% of their total marketing budget on email with trade shows and person to person contact coming in 2nd and 3rd at 14% and 12%.
The take away from all of these email marketing statistics is the importance of gaining permission, providing meaningful and useful content through email, and being careful and thoughtful with your “subject line” message.
If you can manage all of that you have an excellent opportunity to drive significant, sustainable revenue.
Brian Horwitz is a co-founder of Online Visibility Pros, a certified digital marketing firm that specializes in online lead generation for home services businesses, trade contractors, construction companies and a handful of a few other select niche markets. OVP gives these businesses the power to leverage the Internet to generate a steady flow of targeted online leads. 
