The U.S. Postal Service is again in the news debating whether to drop deliveries on Saturday in a cost-cutting measure. If approved it would bring the number of days of mail service down to five, meaning bad news for the direct marketing industry (and for the millions of dogs that playfully guard the house). It would also mean fewer of the familiar big blue mail boxes lining strip malls and streets. As we continue to debate the health of direct mail is it too soon to wonder about email marketing for small business?

The leading reason for asking this question is the rise of social media marketing being used more frequently by small business and entrepreneurs. Arlene Satchell of the Sun-Sentinel tells the story of one entrepreneur that’s been having a lot of success using email marketing to drive traffic resulting in higher customers and more profits.

The story even points out that Forrester Research indicates there’s growth for email in the future, not contraction. According to the story, Forrester says there were 145 million active email users in 2009 and this number is estimated to grow to 153 million by 2014. Also, approximately 90 percent of Americans using the Internet use email as a “mainstream communication channel.”

You can’t argue with those numbers no matter how popular Twitter and Facebook get.

For those of you on the fence and wondering about a little thing called return on investment (ROI), you can decide for yourself after hearing from the gym owner quoted in the story. The owner of Powerhouse Gym recently sent out a free seven-day fitness promotion to more than 4,000 women in the surrounding area. According to the gym owner it cost him $250 to do the email campaign yet his ROI was above $10,000 (the value of 26 new memberships).

The writers of this blog are certainly impressed with those numbers (although we’re a little curious to know how the gym owner collected 4,000+ email addresses from women and if there was any additional expense in obtaining those emails). We often receive a lot of emails ourselves from small businesses wondering how to get so many targeted emails without incurring great expense – especially if you want to throw together an email campaign pretty quickly. After all, it’s always been our understanding that you either collect emails organically or through an integrated campaign tied in with other marketing initiatives like events, or you pay a service for email addresses – which we don’t advocate. Either way, one could make the argument that your total cost of expenses to do the email campaign would rise (bringing into question the gym owner’s investment of only $250).

UPDATE: Arlene Satchell tells us the gym owner was already tapped into the email marketing service provider’s database so there was no cost to purchase a list. The gym owner paid 5 to 6 cents per email sent (which is how he arrives at the $250 fee).

All that being said, there are enormous opportunities with email marketing for small business campaigns. Bottom line, tens of millions of people check their email inbox more than a dozen times each day giving companies a great chance at finding success with email marketing. But always remember to do your email marketing campaigns the right way, which means having people opt-in to receive, giving them an opt-out of they wish and always abiding by the canned spam laws.

Do you prefer email marketing over social media marketing? Let us know by leaving a comment here.