As a business, so much of your ability to succeed in terms of lead generation, customer engagement and other factors comes down to your ability to get the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right moment. Brands often use a wide variety of different techniques to do this, but one of the most important - and effective - is email marketing.

Yes, it's true that people receive countless email messages every day and many of those are very easy to ignore. Having said that, the potential of a well crafted, well-timed email absolutely cannot be overstated - and there are a myriad of different reasons why email marketing is critical for your business that are certainly worth exploring.

The Power of the Message: Email Marketing Statistics

One of the most important things to understand about email marketing is that in terms of your larger outreach efforts, it's practically unparalleled in terms of what it enables you to do (as well as how effectively it enables you to do it).

Consider just a few of the following statistics to help paint a vivid picture about just how powerful both B2C and B2B email marketing can be:

• Experian revealed that transactional emails in particular have a click through rate that is about eight times higher than any other type of email, all while generating about six times the amount of revenue as well.
• About 53% of all emails are opened on mobile devices, this according to research conducted by Campaign Monitor. This gives you the ability to reach out and make contact with someone at virtually any time of day, in any location, and get an immediate reaction.
• An Aberdeen study confirmed that personalized email messages help improve click through rates by an average of about 14%. Those same efforts also help increase conversions by an additional 10%.
• Based on the above, it should come as no surprise that an eConsultancy study said that 74% of marketers believe that this level of targeted personalization also helps to improve customer engagement levels, too.

Any one of these statistics would make a very compelling case for an increased use of email marketing within your business. When taken together, however, they do nothing if not confirm that email marketing is a technique that your brand literally cannot afford to ignore any longer.

The Benefits of Email Marketing

Now that you understand how effective email marketing is in a general sense, you can begin to dive deeper into the types of benefits that it brings to the table that other marketing techniques cannot match.

In terms of lead generation and customer acquisition, for example, email marketing is actually more effective than social media. This is because each of those two mediums has its own unique strength. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are great for interacting with the customers you already have. But if that relationship doesn't already exist, social networking isn't necessarily going to help you.

Customer acquisition for businesses leveraging email marketing, however, is on the rise. In that way, it's best to look at email marketing and social media as two sides of the same coin. Begin a relationship via email marketing, and continue it on social networking as someone works farther down the sales funnel towards a purchase.

Another major benefit is that email marketing is incredibly easy to measure - thus unlocking powerful opportunities to improve the effectiveness of your messaging on a regular basis. Even basic email analytical tools still allow you to track bounce rates, delivery rates, unsubscribe rates, open rates and other key performance indicators. Therefore, you can easily see what types of messages people are responding to - and more importantly, which ones they aren't.

If you make a change to your subject line, the time of day that you send messages out or some other aspect of your campaign, you can see the end result of that change almost immediately. Therefore, you can also respond quickly moving forward - thus removing those elements of your messages that don't work in the way you thought and doubling down on the things that do. This level of measurement alone is hard to replicate via other means.

Email is also very easy to A/B test, trying out subtle variations of messages on smaller segments of your customers before rolling a final version out to your target audience. This is a perfect opportunity to make sure that everything is as perfect as it can be to make the most immediate, grand impression - and it's something that a tweet or a Facebook post does not allow you to do.

In the end, recognize that nobody is saying that you should suddenly throw out all of your other marketing efforts and focus exclusively on email. As the old saying goes -"never put all of your eggs into one basket." Everything has its place - whether you're talking about paid ads or search engine optimization or something else entirely. It's just that when it comes time to choose that technique that will become the foundation of your marketing campaign - the rock solid structure upon which everything else is built - it's clear that email marketing is worthy of your time, your attention and your investment moving forward. At that point, all of these options can come together to form something much stronger as a whole than any one of them could have been on their own - and for any business owner, that is a tremendously exciting position to be in.