It’s no surprise that 97% of online marketers use email. It’s one of the most measurable marketing channels, with a host of measurable data available to track the success of campaigns, such as open rates, click rates, deliverability and sales conversions.

Few channels give marketers the opportunity to deliver personalised marketing messages in the way that email does, so there’s no doubt there are significant returns to be gained for marketers who invest time and resource to build email marketing activity around customer profiles, preferences and behaviour.

But there’s a key point I’m missing here.  Marketing is not just about one channel and, as much as I can wax lyrical about email marketing, its true potential will only be realised if we integrate this form of marketing with other digital activities.

Email works so naturally alongside most other marketing channels, in terms of driving both customer acquisition and retention, but marketers  haven’t always given this fact their full attention.  However, I’ve noticed that the current economic times are encouraging many marketers to reassess their entire marketing spend to make sure they are achieving maximum ROI.

By using email in parallel with other marketing channels, marketers are realising they can obtain the accountability they need.

No where is this more clear than by integrating email marketing with your website for example, and blending the two channels to drive click-throughs to your site and capture data to inform future mail marketing campaigns.

Social media is becoming increasingly popular and is a great driver of email best practice.  Review your communication and ask yourself why anyone would add your email content into their social network. They would have to find it interesting, relevant and compelling. But this won’t happen by accident so time needs to be taken to segment and target, what we call ‘narrowcasting’ rather than broadcasting.

Relevancy, as we know, equals results, but the added upside of spending more time to achieve this is that, should a recipient decide to add your email to their social network, you are now getting your message in front of their peers, who share commons interests and are therefore much more likely to find your email relevant.

Tap into these networks by providing links to social networks in your emails and allowing recipients to quickly and easily share the content virally. Including a subscribe link in your emails, can also become a quick and easy way to build your list full of engaged users.

Email marketing also works very well with Search and SMS, in terms of aiding acquisition by providing vehicles that very quickly let potential recipients add themselves to your mailing list.

With a whole host of marketing channels now available, today’s marketers are missing a trick if they don’t look to blend their efforts to maximise ROI from their budgets. For this reason, as chair of the Partnership Hub of the Email Marketing Council (EMC), I am delighted to tell you that much work is ongoing in not only partnering with other organisations such as the IAB with our Ready Steady Email (www.readysteadyemail.co.uk ) event, but also in partnering with the other councils at the DMA.

The EMC will be putting together events, best practise guidelines and case studies to demonstrate how best to integrate email with the other channels, so watch this space for news and updates on these initiatives.