Internet is the fastest growing marketing medium today, simply because most of your prospects spend more time online than reading a newspaper/magazine, watching TV or other media. It makes infinite more sense to invest in online marketing today as its cheap and hits your prospects directly.

If targeted correctly and message crafted aptly, e-marketing can help you deliver the right content to the right prospect at the right time in the selling cycle and continuously achieve high response rates from quality prospects. Perhaps, that would explain why Microsoft sends out over 20 million email marketing pieces every month.

If you are still unsure, then here are the top 10 reasons, why you should invest in email marketing right away.

1. Global reach: No matter where you are or whom you need to reach, targeted emails pave the way. Borders are no obstacles in email marketing.

2. Lower cost: Costs incurred in designing, executing, testing, sending and receiving an email is up to 78% less for a run of 5000 over paper-based direct mail version. When you add e-mail to your marketing mix, you spend less time, money and resources than with traditional marketing vehicles like direct mail or print advertising.

3. Interactive: You can innovatively initiate campaigns using graphics, videos, music, quiz, game or whatever that will be of interest to your prospect, to grab his attention and interest immediately.

4. Highly personalized: Email enables you to personalize and greet every person you target. This helps in creating a special bond with the prospects.

5. Round the clock marketing: With an email the audience can understand your offering even when you are out of office.

6. Measurable results: Special tools are available that accurately measure click-through rate, conversion rate, how a person one arrived at your website, and more, to enable you to assess the success of different email campaigns.

7. Targeted marketing: Since prepackaged and custom-built lists are available, you could reach only those who might require your services, solutions or products without bothering those who do not. You can select each one of your targets based on geography, age, income, spends, and many other parameters.

8. Opt-in or unsubscribe options: Emails contain opt-in and opt-out options which help you to shortlist your prospects and reach only the ones genuinely interested in your offerings.

9. Faster response: Time to receive responses through e-mail is one to three days, where you will get maximum responses on day one itself, while a direct mail campaign would take minimum 7 to 12 days to generate any responses. Further, responding to a direct mail is more cumbersome, while a person can respond to an email immediately.

10. Simplest: Executing an email campaign is simple and you can do it sitting at home without any extensive resources.

Online marketing is a high response and opportunistic medium for communicating with customers, and if executed right, has the power to bring huge benefits to your business. Go ahead, initiate an extremely targeted e-marketing and see your profits grow. Many of your competitors are doing it already!