Email is the most cost-efficient marketing medium available to organizations today. For example, marketers who leverage subscriber behavior and use that data to segment and target their subscribers deliver mailings that are nine times more profitable than their peers who simply broadcast. The Direct Marketing Association reports that every $1 spent on email marketing drives more than $48 in revenue. A different study in 2008 by Datran Media found that 80 percent of marketers report email is their strongest-performing media buy ahead of search and display advertising.
However, the lesson here is not to see the profitability of email simply as a means of generating revenue; you can also leverage email to reduce operating expenses. For example, brokerage firm Charles Schwab discovered that by sending out personalized end-of-market-day summaries to their clients within 90 minutes of the Write This Down: People who are registered to receive email marketing messages from your company will purchase an average of 167 percent more than those people in your marketing database who are not receiving email.