Email Marketing to Drive Revenue in a Cross-Platform World

A recent study found small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) ($1-50 million and less than 1,000 employees) are spending the largest portion of their marketing budgets on email marketing, not traditional media like print, radio and TV, and not social media like Facebook or Twitter. At 15%, email marketing is ahead of events and trade shows, person-to-person contact, print ads and social media (Local Media Innovation Alliance, "Email Delivers Dollars . . . . and Data).

But it is important to remember that today's email is different than the blanket campaigns of the past. It's precision marketing, not blasting. "It's a campaign to market products or to market your customers' products. It's email marketing. It's about collecting data. It's about making money immediately and it's about driving the relevancy of your property to crazy busy people" (Ruth Presslaff, founder of Presslaff Interactive Revenue).

It is also a cross-platform world with mobile access to email on the rise. In March 2013, IDC surveyed over 1,000 iPhone and Android users between the ages of 18-44 and email ranked number one in use for 78 percent of respondents, ahead of browsing the web or Facebook. Presslaff commented, "When I want to sell a product, it's email. When I want to reach a specific segment of my audience, it's email."

Sheryl Pattek, VP-principal analyst at Forrester Research said. "Smart marketers work to litter potential buyer's paths with actionable data to help solve problems. Then they devise ways to contact them when they are most open to receiving marketing messages."

Local media and other companies that provide marketing services to SMBs have an opportunity to provide email and list rental services to customers. For example, newspaper sales staff can offer print advertisers access to email addresses they don't have, which come along with permission to send messages, demographic data and a high rate of opens and engagement. As reported in the Local Media Innovation Alliance report, "Email Delivers Dollars . . . and Data," The Salisbury Post is a 20,000 circulation daily newspaper based in Rowan County, North Carolina. Their growing email lists can now fetch $125 per thousand addresses from small clients looking to reach these high-quality targets. They charge $750-1,500 to build a contest for a client, an effort which takes one person 15-20 minutes.