For years, email marketing enjoyed the level of hype that is currently being experienced by social media marketing. It was the newest form of marketing that you had to be doing. In the past few years, that hype has died down considerably, but the necessity of doing email marketing hasn’t.

With so much focus going toward social media (as it should), it’s easy for us to forget about all the things that make email an effective and affordable form of marketing.

It’s easy to measure

One of the best things about email marketing is that it’s extremely easy to measure the success of your campaigns. With TV and radio, you don’t really know who has been exposed to your ad. With direct mail, you don’t know for sure if the piece is delivered, and you certainly don’t know if it has been read.

But with email marketing, all these things are almost instantly measurable. You can see how many emails are delivered, how many people have opened the email and what links are clicked on. You have instant insight into the success and impact of your campaign.

It’s easy to adjust

With all the insight you gain from your email metrics, it’s now possible to adjust your campaigns based on what works and what doesn’t. You can adjust subject lines to improve your open rates. You can adjust the design and placement of links to improve click rates. You can adjust the content and value to decrease the unsubscribe rates.

A lot of email marketing platforms even allow you do to these adjustments on the fly using A/B split testing. This feature lets you test elements like subject lines, send times and from names. The system sends two different versions of your email to two small test groups randomly selected from your list. Whichever version gets the best results is then sent to the rest of your list.

You get the most bang for your buck 

Let’s not forget that sending email is dirt-cheap. It seriously costs pennies to send thousands of emails. When you compare that to the hundreds or thousands that you’ll spend on direct mail, radio and TV, it’s obvious that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective methods of advertising today.

More importantly, email generally has a similar response rate to direct mail. So when you’re looking at your return on investment, email definitely wins.

You can combine it with other forms of marketing

Because email is so cheap and effective, you can easily use it in conjunction with your other forms of marketing to bolster the effectiveness of your overall campaign. Have your email marketing link to your social presence, and offer a way to sign up for your emails on your website and social networking profiles. If you send out a direct mail piece, send the same piece in an email.

Don’t underestimate the value of email marketing. It may not be the latest and greatest thing, but it’s still a very valuable part of your marketing campaign. The most effective marketers realize that there isn’t one ultimate channel to reach customers; you need to have a strong mix utilizing multiple forms of media to effectively reach them. And, for now, that should probably involve email.