In Econsultancy's latest Email Marketing Census marketers claim that Email Marketing delivers the best return on investment.

For the past 8 years Email Marketing has consistantly been cited by marketers as having delivered the highest or second highest ROI compared to other channels such as PPC, Search, Direct Marketing, Social Media, Content Marketing and Mobile Marketing. 

And when asked the same question, the agencies have reported an even better return on investment as shown below.

 

What continually astounds me every time I see results such as this, is just how little marketers are utilising the strengths of this channel – yet despite this, Email Marketing is still coming on top for ROI.

This begs the question; what if we were to begin to really maximise the strengths of email marketing – or even performed the most basic processes to ensure maximum results from this channel?

To me, this is what makes email marketing very exciting. As marketers we're not yet leveraging all that the email channel has to offer, yet it's delivering the highest ROI – and even that isn't acounting for all the results it delivers.  It also delivers results that aren't attributed to it.  It drives traffic to other channels including offline and in-store and is one of the main drivers of traffic to a website.

As you can see in the below chart, some of the key processes or factors of an email campaign are getting very little attention – especially when compared to a typical campaign in other channels. 29% of marketers aren't optimising their campaigns and the shocking thing to note (as seen in the report) is that his hasn't really changed from the results of the 2008 census. 

 You can access the full Econsultancy Email Marketing Census 2014 Report here.