Email marketing is consistently a leader when compared with other forms of generating sales online. Once again, a new study of 1,100 businesses – mostly in the UK – has found that email marketing is much better in terms of generating sales than other forms of digital marketing.

The results of the study show that 68% of marketers thought that email marketing was good or excellent compared with only 32% of them thinking that social media marketing was like that. In other words, email marketing is thought t be twice as good as social media marketing.

Search marketing came a close second to email marketing and content marketing wasn’t far behind – but remember that organic search depends on content, so the two are inextricably linked. The worst performer in terms of generating sales – as always – was display advertising.

Apart from the fact that email marketing has won the popularity poll – again – these figures also confirm another obvious feature. The most popular forms of marketing are those  which are content heavy. Social media, mobile and display advertising tend to be short snippets of information to fulfil the requirements of those kind of media. But the elements at the top of the poll are those which tend to have long forms of content.

Not only is this a sign that many businesses need to concentrate more than they do on email marketing, it is also confirmation that long form content is the one that generates most sales. But then you only have to look at the Reader’s Digest from 30 years ago to know that. They discovered that a 21-page sales letter sold more subscriptions than a 7-page letter.

It is time to write more not less if you want to generate more sales online.