Email marketing remains popular, effective for many businesses

While today's marketers have a seemingly endless supply of high-tech options available to them for communicating with consumers, it's interesting to note that email marketing tools are still in high demand and remain frequently in use. You may think that building a brand these days is all about retweets and Facebook likes, and to a certain extent you're right, but email still has a place in the modern marketing landscape.

Ko Marketing Associates recently published a good deal of evidence to back this up. The news source drew upon survey findings from marketing solution provider Ascend2, which surprisingly found that despite the decline in hype surrounding email marketing, actual use of the strategy is in fact going up. Ascend2 found that 54 percent of marketers rank email as the No. 1 most effective tactic at their disposal. They also rated it as the easiest method - only 11 percent of respondents said email marketing was difficult to execute.

Here are a few additional findings:

• Business-to-business marketers still see email as a valuable medium for lead generation. About 87 percent of respondents said they would use the channel to find leads this year, which actually marked a slight increase from 86 percent a year ago.
• Email doesn't just bring in more leads - it also gets better ones. The survey found that 73 percent of marketers get valuable information from web registrations or opt-ins from people they contact via email. That's huge.
• Why else is email so popular? Affordability. Sending an email just takes a few minutes to write and click "send," and you can use it to contact millions of people. The survey found that 70 percent of marketers use email as a communication channel because of its low cost.

None of this is to say social media or mobile apps are dead - just that in its own right, email marketing still remains enormously relevant.