Here's a test you can conduct today in your local High Street. Grab a clipboard and ask 100 people whether they have heard of "email". Ask them also if they have heard of "RSS". Then ask them another question: ask which of these two communication systems they have ever used. The chances are almost everyone will have heard of email and most of them will be using it. But as for RSS, most people will say "RS what?". In spite of the online world having links to "RSS feeds" and even though Google gives us almost 33m pages for the term "RSS Reader", few people outside the world of technology are bothered by RSS; it is a complete mystery to them.

Email is still hugely powerful, so do not ignore its value in your business

For several years now, people have been predicting the death of email. It has yet to materialise. Every time someone makes the suggestion that email is on the way out, along comes more research to prove the opposite. Indeed, on the same day that HubSpot published its research, another study was released which shows that spam email succeeds because half of us open emails we already believe to be spam based on the subject line alone. In other words, we may complain about spam, but many of us still look at it. It's yet more evidence of the power of email.

So, what should your business be doing and how can you get more readers for your blog? The answer is to offer email subscriptions to your blog so that people can receive your regular articles in their inbox. You can do this using the services of Google's Feedburner system, for instance. Or you can try FeedBlitz which offers a more sophisticated service. (If you want to subscribe to this blog via email just subscribe here.)

You can also offer digests of your blog via email using services such as ZinePal which allows you to automate the production of a regular PDF file of your blog which can then be emailed. (If you want the weekly digest of this blog go to this link and choose an option from the bottom of the page.)

Alternatively, you can cut and paste material from your blog into a newsletter or email you send out regularly using services such as Marketers Choice or GetResponse.

But whatever you do, do not ignore the power of email. Even though people complain about email overload, even though they moan about spam and even though they say it is tired, old technology, almost all of the people who could connect with your business would rather do it via email.

Here's a quick task for you: go through your inbox and find some emails from the employees of companies you are in contact with. They may be messages from technical support people, or perhaps receipts from the accounts department, maybe something from an executive or two. Now take a close look at those emails and see how much opportunity has been taken by the business sending the email.

Email is a missed opportunity for many businesses

The chances are none of these things have happened. I took a look at 50 different emails from various businesses in my inbox from the last couple of weeks. Only two had any form of additional information in the email which could have either led to extending the relationship or selling me anything.

An email signature is not enough - after all, it usually only contains the address and phone number of the company and their logo. Businesses see that as important in terms of branding, forgetting that the only people who really care about the corporate logo are the internal "branding police". The rest of us couldn't give a fig. Having the logo at the bottom of the email is not important to us - but knowing how we might extend our relationship with the business is much more valuable. Or being offered a "voucher" for future purchases is also more interesting than a standard email signature.

Every email a business sends is an opportunity to entice customers or potential clients to get closer to the company in some way. Yet few businesses use this opportunity in any real, practical or useful way. It means having personalised additional information at the end of each email that is sent out by a business. It means taking a moment or two extra time to include a useful piece of additional material that could lead to an extended relationship or even a purchase.

If you don't take that time to go beyond what the email is about you are missing an opportunity. McDonalds never misses the "upsell" of "Do you want fries with that?", yet so many businesses that use email fail to consider getting more from the reader in any way. So, if your technical support team answer queries via email, for instance, they may need some kind of system that will help them add something, such as a voucher, to their technical emails. Or you may need to establish a series of online polls that can be automatically added to every customer service email.

But whatever you do, don't miss the opportunity an email provides to get closer to your customers or to offer them items they may want to buy from you. A standard signature is not enough - personalised, relevant additional material will engage people and will thereby increase your customer connections.

Email marketing is a waste of almost everyone's time. You spend a considerable part of your day handling email marketing messages. You either read them and then ignore them, or delete them or file them - but whatever you do, several hours of your working week are spent handling email messages you don't need or want.

The hours and hours spent on email strategy could be a waste of time

Yet, creative teams work for days on "getting the campaign right", there are endless meetings between the agencies and the clients and yet come the day of sending everyone knows that those hours and hours spent working on the project are mostly worthless.

In spite of this, recent research shows that spending on email marketing is going to rise by 11% reaching a staggering $2bn by 2014. And by that time, each and every one of us will be on the receiving end of 9,000 marketing emails a year. It seems that the "thinking" that email strategists have is "if we don't get enough people to open or click through, then the answer must be to send more emails". Mmmm.

The email numbers game
Email marketing agencies will tell you that part of the success is the "numbers game". Tesco, for instance, probably doesn't really mind that much that 95% of people don't click through on emails. When you are sending out, say, 10m emails at a time a 5% click through rate is a healthy half a million people. But if they were only sending out 1,000 emails, 50 customers wouldn't even pay for the creative work. So, there is some logic in the "send more to get more" theory.

Email marketing agencies will also tell you that part of the success is the "targeting game". Making sure your emails reach their precise targets is going to get you more business than sending out blanket messages in the hope that someone will read them. But here's the problem - your targets are always moving. Even if you are precisely focused on people who are interested in, say, video production, their requirements and interests about video production change from day to day. One day they are interested in how to improve the lighting in their videos, the next day they are concerned about minimising video sizes for web sites. If you send out an email about web based video on the day they are thinking about lighting, you won't connect.

You cannot connect with your readers
That's the real issue with email marketing. At the time you send out the emails, no matter how well targeted they are, you don't know if the message will truly connect because you don't know what's in your audience's mind. So perhaps we need a new way of thinking about email marketing. Instead of sending messages, perhaps we should be receiving them. Rather than sending messages to our clients and potential clients, maybe they should be sending messages to us.

That way, we would know precisely what was on their mind and could respond with a highly targeted message that is much more likely to connect and will have a higher click through rate. It means, instead of wasting our time on planning email marketing campaigns that are going to be 95% wasted, we could spend our time organising a variety of methods in which customers and potential customers could ask us questions, get our support, connect with us. At the moment, many businesses focus on sending material TO their potential clients, rather than receiving stuff FROM them.

In spite of the fact that email marketing achieves higher conversion rates than web marketing, the time has come to stop talking to our customers and start listening. That way we'll know what's on their mind, rather than guessing - and that can only lead to even higher conversion rates.

Customers are more likely to buy via email than any other means. That's the conclusion of a new study by e-Dialog which showed that 63% of people would make an impulse buy as a result of an email. The survey of over 5,000 people in Europe showed clearly that email is the best online sales channel available to businesses.

Email continues to be the best possible method of selling products online

The least popular means of buying something would be via social networks, according to the research. Only 11% of people would be likely to make a purchase following the receipt of promotional material via a social network. Even web sites themselves only managed a 47% chance of people buying something - way behind email.

Many businesses ignore email as a promotional method, yet in spite of spam, this still continues to be the system of choice for consumers and buyers. They prefer to make decisions about what to buy - especially for impulse purchases - using emails, rather than any other means.

Not only do people buy via email, they also appear to use email as the method of choice for informing them about products they might buy. Six out of ten people in the survey said they would be likely to buy something in a physical store if they had first received an email about the product.

The study should prove interesting reading for anyone trying to sell online. What it confirms is that emails can remind people of the offline promotions they have seen, stimulating purchases. Furthermore, the study also showed that people are more likely to buy if the email offers a promotion, particularly a time-limited one.

However, few people could actually recall being sent effective, relevant promotional emails. This should be a wake-up call to all people trying to sell online. What the study shows is that customers and potential purchasers are actually waiting by their PCs ready to click on promotional emails, likely to buy something. Sadly, it seems most companies are not targeting emails, not connecting them well with their offline promotions and not really connecting with their customers.

Businesses spend hours on end and thousands of pounds on making sure their web site is correct. This study confirms - yet again - that the money would be better directed into email marketing.

Twitter is the current "in thing"; the numbers of people using it is rising exponentially. But could it have reached its peak? Remember just a year ago when the buzz was about Second Life? What happened? It didn't even get discussed at the recent Social Media Conference in London. And remember Friends Reunited? That's been a serious failure for ITV which is now touting it around in the hope it can sell off the doomed site. So is it possible that Twitter will go the same way - a here today, gone tomorrow "fad"?

All the evidence is that Twitter is something different and is likely to survive long-term. Indeed, more people are now using social networking sites than email - or so the statistics would have us believe. But there is a quirk in the figures. The data show that more accounts of Twitter, Facebook and so on were logged into than email accounts. However, as always in statistical information, there's a hidden problem.

Many individuals have multiple social networking accounts. Consider yourself, for instance, you may have a Twitter account, one at Facebook, another with MySpace and another with Ecademy. That's before we even think about your account with LinkedIn, Ning, or dozens of other social networking sites. Plus, many people have "multiple identities" - a Facebook account for personal matters and another for their business; a Twitter account for their friends to follow and another one for customers and perhaps several more for specific promotional purposes. But how many online email accounts do you have with the likes of Hotmail, or GMail? True, some people have multiple email accounts, but the chances are you have more social networking accounts than email ones. Hence the data that suggests more people are logging onto to social networking than email could be misleading us.

And that could be a problem; it might divert your attention away from email toward social networking. But don't let it. Email is still significant in helping people to decide whether or not they want to buy from you. New research shows that two out of three people use emails to help them decide about online purchases. If you are tempted to give up or reduce email in favour of using social networking sites because of their apparent popularity you could be cutting down your chances of income, rather than increasing it.

As an example, I sell five times as many ebooks using email campaigns than I do via social networking site. I'm not alone either - Tesco and Amazon produce significant returns via email marketing and only use social networking in comparatively minor ways.

It's all too easy to be swept along with the tide of support for Twitter, Facebook and so on. Fantastic as they are - and they are essential business tools - don't let the euphoria steal your focus for your business. Email is still significant. And remember, email has been with us for over 30 years and is still a regular, daily occurrence for us. Social networking sites come and go. Put all your eggs in the social networking basket and you could seriously affect your income.

Email is such a fundamental part of business that any failure in the system would cause a loss of income for one in every five companies. That's one of the stark findings of a new survey from Neverfail. In a study of over 200 companies, the business continuity firm found that 19% of IT managers said that their organisations would suffer financially if the email system was out of action. One in every four businesses said they would have reduced employee productivity if the email systems failed. Amazingly, one in every 17 companies in the survey would be unable to meet regulatory compliance in their sector if the email system crashed.

These figures show just how important email has become to any business. How much of your day is spent on emails and other forms of electronic messaging, such as Twitter, Instant Messages, Facebook pokes and so on?

Apparently, 58% of us handle emails every day. And considering there are over 1.2billion email users, that's an awful lot of email messages whizzing around the planet.

But what would happen if your email system froze, collapsed, hit the carpet? You might think you would cope, for instance, being able to send emails from a webmail account, or signing up quickly with GMail or Yahoo!Mail. However, you would certainly lose productive time working. Plus you would lose image and reputation to some degree.

Clearly having backup systems in place is vital. If you can't afford the services of business continuity experts, then the least you should do is have two main email accounts using different hosting companies, based on different servers. That way if one goes bust, breaks, or otherwise causes you problems you can use the other one straight away. Having one hosting company who deals with all your web sites, domain names and email is simply too high a risk to take for a small business.

Also, remember that email marketing will bring you more money than web marketing. The highest return on investment in any online marketing comes from email.  Repeated studies have shown this. Plus, recent research suggests that people are buying even more from email now, in spite of the recession.

So, email is your most important tool in the online business world. It might be inconvenient without it and you might be unproductive for a day or two until any failure is sorted. But with email marketing being so valuable to you, any problems with your email system could significantly affect your income too.

Time to get your email system sorted..!

If you run a small business and want to protect yourself from potential email system failures, my report on How to Set Up An Email System is available to download. Just click the link below.

Files for downloading

File	Description	File size
EmailSystem	How to set up an email system for small business	128 Kb

Statisticians have been bent double over data about email marketing and have come up with an answer to a question that is pretty pointless. Every year various people try to analyse what is the best day of the week to send out a marketing email. The notion is that if you know which day of the week most people open their emails, then you stand a greater chance of being seen if you hit the inbox on the appropriate day.

Back in 2005 we were told it's definitely Friday, well by a short margin anyway. That was a significant change, because up until 2005 we were all told it's Wednesday. But no, Friday was confirmed as the best day - "open day" - by analysts in 2006. New research, though suggests marketers have turned their back on Friday's because most email is now sent out on a Monday or Tuesday.

Who cares? Well email marketing "experts" - there's tons of debate throughout the web on when is the best time to send an email, which day, from which country, which city....aaargh enough...! Let's face facts - it doesn't matter much.

Most people open emails every day - including at weekends. Most people pay little attention to which country the email came from, or what time of day it was sent. The one thing we all pay attention to is the subject line. Yet, this appears to be the area that is given least attention by many marketers. According to Epsilon, who analysed over 1 billion emails - honest - companies spend more time on creating the contents of the email than they do on the subject line.

Plus, with the amount of chatter there is about which day to send the emails is it any wonder that open rates are lower than desired by most marketers. Here's a trick you can learn from the world of tabloid newspapers - such as The Sun. They sell in their millions, largely because the headlines grab the attention of people who are then prepared to fork out some cash and buy the paper. Newspapers like The Sun often devote more time and effort to the headline itself than they do the story that goes underneath it. And that's why they succeed in their version of "open rates" - people buying from newsagents.

So, rather than worry about all the statistical data on email open rates, days to get a better chance of being opened and all that stuff, simply spend more time and effort on your subject lines. And if you want to see if your subject line is likely to appeal, get it tested at the Headline Analyzer.