The primacy of email as an effective marketing tool continues to rise, with studies showing email continuing to be the most popular marketing and sales channel and the one generating the highest ROI. For marketers, the key direction-and key challenge-is the integration of email with other channels, including social media and mobile.

Check out these 14 signs email marketing is poised for more growth:

Optify is among those that see the role of email growing larger, predicting that with the increase of social media and mobile usage, “email marketing is growing to astonishing rates and in 2013 we will see even bigger growth as more businesses adopt online marketing.”

This view is supported by Lyris’s recently released “2012 Digital Optimizer Report,” which found that email marketing topped the list of digital marketing practices and generated the highest ROI. Likewise, the latest Direct Marketing Association’s Response Rate 2012 Report showed that email (at $28.50) continued to lead all other marketing channels in return on investment.

In line with these findings was Forrester Research’s Email Marketing Forecast, which showed a steady rise in the amount of money marketers will spend on email marketing in the United States, growing from about $1.7 billion in 2012 to about $2.5 billion in 2016.

Btobonline.com’s “Email Marketing: A Legacy Channel Continues to Deliver” survey found that email marketing was the workhorse favored by B2B marketers, with customer acquisition and lead nurturing cited as the two primary goals of email programs. A substantial portion of email marketers are using marketing automation to send triggered emails based on recipient actions (such as registering for a webinar or downloading a white paper), according to BtoB’s survey.

Email marketing also was identified as the chief B2B marketing channel and the one producing the highest-quality leads in Software Advice and Eloqua’s B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey. The survey showed that email marketing was the main area that B2B marketers planned to focus their efforts this year, along with SEO and social media.

The importance of email for small businesses was seen in a recent Aweber survey that showed that more than 77% of small businesses surveyed attributed growth in business and sales to their email marketing efforts. Building on this success, 85% of respondents said they planned to increase their use of email marketing in 2013.

Mitch Lapides on FulcrumTech cited a number of strong survey results as indicators of email marketing’s profitability and continued growth, including an ExactTarget study that shows that 77% of online consumers prefer to get permission-based marketing messages via email versus any other marketing channel, and a Radicati Group projection forecasting that the number of email accounts will increase from about 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in 2014. Email also was found to be the top activity for mobile Internet users, accounting for 41.6% of U.S. mobile Internet time, according to Nielsen survey data.

Mike Hotz on Clickz.com also portrays a thriving email channel based on two key indicators from Digital Strategy Consulting survey results-first, that 67 percent of customers give their email addresses to companies to receive discounts and promotions, and second that 57 percent of customers say they are more apt to buy a product in a store after receiving an email.

Social and mobile are leading areas of email investment, according to Strongmail’s year-end survey, which showed that two-thirds of businesses surveyed planned to integrate social media with email, while 46% planned to increase investment in using email to drive growth in their social media channels. Plans to integrate mobile and email increased from 44% in 2012 to 52% in 2013, according to the survey.

Overall, the data shows that email continues to thrive as a primary communication channel and source of information for users, and as a profitable channel for marketers, while the new dimensions brought by social media and mobile multiply email’s reach and effectiveness.

Are you planning to spend more on email marketing in the coming years? Keep your email marketing list clean with email hygiene.

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