Only 1.5% businesses are making use of mobile marketing automation but guess what, they earning major return on investment. Marketers enjoy when they get more money than invested. New study on email marketing conducted by Jon Cifuentes evaluating a broad audience of 1,300 marketers and over 48,000 companies revealed that email is still the best way to get maximum return on investment (ROI).

Thanks to email marketing, mid-sized businesses are enjoying 246% ROI. Even though returns are high, email marketing is also one of the most expensive marketing channels to manage.

An analyst at VB Insight, Cifuentes said “You can think of email as the center of orchestrating all of your customer relationships,”, He continued. “It can be an expensive control booth, just based on all the things you can accomplish with it. The infrastructure costs add up. Email infrastructure partners, ESPs, analytics partners, agencies and content services, media spend for growing subscribers, and finally talent to run the show. It adds up, but the potential ROI you can achieve with email marketing shows you how vital it is to get it right.”

Cifuentes discovered similar cost pattern in his “State of Marketing Technology Winter 2015 report”. According to 2,119 marketing technology users email marketing requires high resource for proper management. 85% of the email marketing users are at manager level or above.

Even when email marketing is costly to maintain, there is no doubt in the result it fetches. Small to medium businesses can gain up to 183% return. Enterprise-level organizations average 117% return of investment.

Even after instant in- app messaging grabs the headline; emails have not fallen out of place. According to the prediction of research firm Radicati, email users world wide will be increasing to 2.8 billion over the next four years. Email is still the most prevalent form of online communication.  Email has become the part of daily life for marketers.

For a number of reasons, we’ve been trained to be sold to via email,” Cifuentes said. “It may be that with targeting on a mobile device, there’s just a finer line between useful and creepy. I’m watching that space with interest, and am excited to see new research on data privacy, and consumer preferences”

It’s high time that you target audience with the help of email marketing. High internal costs, expanding target audience and 246% average return at risk, email marketing requires your attention for sure.