Right now you are probably reading this in an office while sitting at your desk. On your desk is a computer and inside that computer are hundreds of e-mails addressed to you.

E-mail is both a bane and a miracle of the modern office. It’s the thing that keeps your organization running, increases your ability to communicate, lowers your mailing costs and makes your marketing more effective. It can be a big headache too, just ask your IT department.

If it is so much trouble, why do we use it? E-mail is the most cost-effective method of marketing. Period. According to a 2006 study by the Direct Marketing Association, “the return-on-investment (ROI) for e-mail marketing was $57.25 for every dollar spent. The ROI of all other online marketing was $22.52, less than half that of e-mail.” The study goes on to say that for catalogs, “e-mail outperforms mailed catalogs by a factor of 7.15 to one ($51.45 vs. $7.29).”

How can we determine if it is working? There are four statistics that everyone should know: delivery rate, open rate, clickthrough rate and click-to-open rate. Delivery Rate is how many of your e-mails were successfully delivered to the recipient’s Internet Service Provider (ISP). Open Rate is how many of the e-mails that were delivered to the recipients inbox were viewed. Clickthrough Rate is how many of these viewed e-mails were clicked on, and Click-To-Open Rate is the relationship of the number of opened e-mails to the number of clicked-on e-mails.

Hey wait a minute. Isn’t e-mail becoming less effective? Actually no. If you take into account how cost-effective it is, it will continue to remain part of your marketing arsenal for many years. In addition, e-mails have become more sophisticated and interesting by incorporating links to PDFs, audio podcasts and videos that recipients can click on. Is your executive director making a public announcement of who the keynote speaker will be at next year’s conference? Record her doing that and link it to an e-mail. Did you just finish your annual report for the membership? Skip the printer and upload it to the website while adding the link to your e-mail newsletter.

Can associations use e-mail effectively? Every association is probably a user of e-mail so you are already on the bandwagon, yet you can still find ways to make it much more effective. Your first order of business should be tracking and analyzing what you are sending. Otherwise you are piloting your plane without a map. Get yourself hooked up with an outside e-mail vendor; ExactTarget, Vertical Response and Constant Contact will have the tracking and sending software you’ll need.

If you are still mailing out membership notices, newsletters or trade show announcements the old fashioned way, you are costing your association money. The cheapest postcard costs around 40-cents to print and send per recipient. That same message sent via e-mail costs less than a penny. You don’t need to be a math wizard to see the cost savings.

Also, e-mail is testable and trackable. You can experiment with your message subject lines or e-mail page designs just like the big guys do. Consider running A/B tests until you’ve got your message exactly right. In less than 48 hours you will know how well your mailing did, who got it and who read it. With some additional tweaking, you can increase its effectiveness too. Can you do that with any other marketing method?

A quick look at your present marketing efforts will uncover ways that e-mail marketing can be useful. Even though it may fill up your inbox and there are days when you’d rather remain anonymous, e-mail is still the best and most cost-effective marketing method available to your association.

Note: This also appeared in the 2008 Minnesota Society of Association Executives Technology & Facilities Resource Guide.