It’s been pronounced “dead” a half-dozen times since spam almost killed it for real in the mid-90s, and today you’ll find it trampled underfoot by hordes of inexperienced marketers eager for the Next Big Thing.

For businesses — even small ones — that’s a shame.

One longtime small business client knew their email program made the phones ring, but didn’t know the extent until we spent a year measuring their results — and discovered their four quarterly emails accounted for better than 40% of their annual revenue. (They’ve since gone monthly.)

Email refuses to die, and for good reason

In fact, email might just be the single most effective, highest-ROI online marketing channel for businesses and nonprofits alike.

When the recession landed on the economy, large marketers cut advertising and promotion budgets to the bone — yet spending on email marketing (alone among the traditional marketing channels) actually increased.

Clearly, experienced marketers recognize the ROI of email programs, especially once you integrate it with emerging social media channels like Google+, Facebook, Twitter and others (the channels that “killed” it the last time it died).

Frankly, it’s a natural fit. Here are three reasons why:

Email’s On Demand; Social Is a Stream

Email sits in that inbox until someone reads or deletes it; social media is a stream, and notices are easy to miss.

The two channels balance each other beautifully. And our friendly, versatile email is wholly capable of driving traffic to your social media channels, which isn’t exactly true in reverse.

Email Addresses Are More Valuable Than “Likes”

A customer’s email address is almost certainly more valuable than a Facebook “Like” or Twitter follow; pushing a “Like” button is a simple act, and according to this study, doesn’t signify much in terms of brand loyalty.

Plus, if the social media channel fades or the customer stops visiting, their social media contact has little value.

And should you leave that social media platform, all those hard-won customer contacts don’t go with you — the price you pay for participating in social media, which is essentially a series of walled gardens.

By contrast, a customer’s email address is yours until orphaned or unsubscribed.

Email Offers More Scope for Message Delivery

Simply put, emails can deliver a prettier and more complete messages than most social media channels, and that’s a real advantage to email marketers, especially if they’re lucky enough to sell products featuring high visual values.

It’s Not All Roses

Despite a host of new tools designed to make it easier, good email programs can be time-consuming — a real problem in smaller organizations which lack a dedicated marketing grunt.

And while many focus on the difficulties of generating content and crafting the email, that’s really on half the story.

To be effective, you need to build your email list.

Pretty much all the time.

And a lot of small organizations can’t (or won’t) bother.

That’s one reason why so many of the new online marketing consultants can’t or won’t talk about email; it’s not as easy as Facebook. (The other reason is most of them don’t know anything about email, which is not something you admit to a client.)

My Recommendations

I push my more sophisticated clients towards MailChimp; they offer a free account for lists under 2000 names, which means a client can kick the tires on an email program without the pressure of a monthly charge bearing down.

MailChimp is also relatively easy to use (it’s not the easiest, but it is the most fun), and offers excellent social media integration.

They’re always innovating new gadgets, a personal favorite being their OnStage system, which hosts prospective email campaigns online so any number of people (at least those with the right link and password) can leave comments right on the design.

(That’s the kind of timesaver that makes email people cry.)

There’s still a learning curve involved, and for those needing a little less power, I’m suggest TinyLetter, which makes sending simple bulk emails almost as easy as sending a note to your Aunt.

MailChimp recently bought TinyLetter and are continuing it as a free service, and I can’t think of a better way to introduce my less-practiced clients to the wonders (and high ROI) of email marketing.

Email isn’t dead, and certainly hasn’t been killed by social media.

It’s just sitting in the corner and quietly making money — for those who know its secrets.

It’s not as if I ignore it; it’s just that urging clients to invest large amounts of time in media platforms they don’t own or control raises a few red flags.

Or at least it should. There are plenty of opportunities and just as many potholes; maximizing the former and avoiding the latter should be your goal.

So what should you avoid?

You’re Not The Customer, You’re The Product

Too many marketers have simply handed themselves over to proprietary social media platforms, ceding control to platforms that are trying very, very hard to monetize themselves.

Wordyard’s Scott Rosenberg touches on this when he speaks to the dangers journalists face when indulging an over-reliance on Facebook (to the detriment of their organization’s own website):

Here’s where my uneasiness comes from: Today Facebook is a private company that is almost certainly going to sell stock to the public before long. It will have quarterly earnings reports to make and pressure to deliver to investors. It is run by almost impossibly young people who have never had to deal with any business condition other than hockey-stick-curve growth. For the moment it appears to be trying hard to operate as a neutral and open public platform; its constant tinkering and rethinking of the design and functionality of its services can be maddening, but so far have tended to be driven by a serve-the-user impulse.

That won’t last forever. There are plenty of people waiting to cash in on Facebook’s success, and more in the wings, and they will expect the company to fulfill its inevitable destiny — and “monetize” the hell out of all the relationship-building we’re doing on its pages.

This is the landscape onto which today’s journalists are blithely dancing. I understand why they’re doing it, but I wish the larger companies and institutions would think a little harder about the future.

This is aimed at journalists, but it’s also true for organizations.

What happens when Facebook’s attempts to monetize come into direct conflict with your organization’s aims?

What happens when you invest a sizable portion of your marketing budget (time and money) into Facebook, then watch that investment devalue once Facebook changes the way it operates, or — like prior “must have” social media channels MySpace, Second Life, Friendster, etc — it simply fades from view.

(Those who say it can’t happen lack a basic appreciation of social media history.)

Unlike an email list, you don’t own those 10,000 “Likes” or the platform they’re visiting, so you’re  at the mercy of Facebook (or Twitter, or Bebo, or…).

And all that content sweat equity?

It will be worth very little. (What’s a Second Life avatar worth these days?)

In the end, if you’re not paying for a social media service, then you — and your freely provided content — are the product being sold.

Which forces us to ask a difficult question: is all that social media time and effort enriching your organization, or simply making Facebook richer?

Many of my clients can’t give me an answer to that question.

How Not To Get Burned

As a consultant, I offer my clients a few social media marketing pointers:

• Transform “uncontrolled” social media assets into something more tangible for your organization (like opt-in email addresses)
• Drive traffic from social media to your site rather than vice versa (several clients were driving traffic from their site to Facebook — a manifestly bad idea)
• Whenever possible, leverage content across multiple media channels
• Automate as much of the work as is possible (new tools make it very simple)
• Measure social media impacts on revenues (don’t assume that investing time in Facebook automatically pays dividends, especially when considering opportunity costs to other channels like email)
• Recognize that social media is registering all the signs of a bubble; those who ignore this may wind up on the wet end when it pops

Social media isn’t the devil, nor is it online marketing’s silver bullet.

It can produce for your organization, but don’t believe all the hype — or plow blindly ahead lacking any hint of a return.

When I started my marketing career 25 years ago, simply piping a marketing message to the market presented some serious problems; good “creative” work was only an (inexpensive) starting point to a drawn-out process.

Ad production was hugely expensive, and lead times were horrendous.

Online marketing was hardly any better; as recently as a decade ago, building corporate websites and firing even simple email programs required cumbersome, expensive and inflexible technology.

Even simple campaign data was hard to come by.

By today’s standards, it was hardly marketing at all.

The Technology Barriers Fall

Today, the technology barriers have largely disappeared (to a complete neophyte it doesn’t seem like it, but trust me, they have).

Even the smallest businesses have access to astonishing technology; dynamic, CMS-powered websites that integrate every conceivable media channel while easily (and instantly) publishing words, video, images, audio, feeds (and pretty much anything else).

They even tell the world when it happens.

Wholly affordable email host providers (one of whom will give you a free account) offer astonishing analytics, and will even – for free – research the social networking “connectedness” of the email addresses on your list.

In other words, connecting is easy. Publishing almost free. And getting “the word” out is no longer a problem.

Getting noticed is.

Marketing’s technology barriers have tumbled, and what remains is the message itself – which runs headlong into today’s shortened attention span and the deafening, wholly chaotic online universe (I never said it would be easy).

Instead of wrestling with technology (often expensive technology), you’re wrestling with content generation.

Congratulations.

You’re not a marketing department (or marketer, or small businessperson, or insurance salesman, or dog walker, or…).

You’re a media company.

How are you planning to deal with that?