Advantages
• According to research conducted by the Direct Marketing Association, e-mail marketing generated an ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. The expected figure for 2010 is $42.08. As such, it outperforms all the other direct marketing channels examined, such as print catalogs .
• In Datran Media’s 2010 Annual Marketing & Media Survey, 39.4 percent of industry executives said the advertising channel that performed strongest for them was e-mail.
• The Ad Eff ectiveness Survey commissioned by Forbes Media in February/March 2009 revealed that e-mail and e-newsletter marketing are considered the second most eff ective tool for generating conversions, just behind search engine marketing.
• A December 2008 survey of hundreds of marketers by MarketingSherpa saw pay-per-click search
ads rank top for ROI, followed by e-mail marketing in second place.
Disadvantages
E-mail marketing’s prolific evil twin is known as spam. According to a 2009 McAfee Threats Report, spam accounts for 92 percent of all e-mails. That’s about 183 million e-mails per day. Why, with all the spam filters and blacklists out there, does spam still exist? According to a spam study by the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Diego, spam generally gets one response per 12,500,000 e-mails, a response rate of just 0.00001 percent. A recent report has upped the number to 95 percent of e-mail as spam.