Email marketing continues to provide large returns for etailers

[mandy]

Despite all the time and resources that retailers are pouring into their paid and natural search programs and the efforts they’re making in understanding new alternatives such as social networking, e-mail marketing continues to thrive.

E-mail remains a fundamental and highly productive marketing tool for almost all web retailers. In fact, 73% of chain retailers, catalogers, virtual merchants and consumer brand manufacturers taking part in Internet Retailer’s latest monthly survey—this one on e-mail marketing—spend 5% of their marketing budget or less on e-mail marketing, yet just over half of respondents, 50.6%, report that 6% or more of their sales come from e-mail marketing, with 25% saying the proportion is over 11%...

Web merchants use e-mail to communicate frequent information updates and product promotions to their best customers—63.8% of retailers conduct up to three e-mail campaigns each month and another 25.2% conduct between four and eight campaigns. 62.8% also indicate that they’ve increased the frequency of e-mail campaigns in the past year...

full article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=19741