Desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones — email is everywhere.

In 2012, a Marketing Channel and Engagement Benchmark survey polled a variety of small companies who’ve implemented online marketing techniques in their business plans. Around 63% of them listed email marketing specifically as the top practice for achieving the best return on investment. In other words, when you want to keep your customers informed (and bring in as many new opportunities as you can), a good email marketing plan seems to be the most popular options by an overwhelming margin.

But why? Why is email so much more successful than SEO, social media or PPC campaigns when it comes to lead generation and cultivation? For those answers, we’ll have to delve into even more numbers.

Email drives customer purchasing decisions.

An estimated 44% of web users are more likely to buy something if they’ve received information about it in an email. It’s all about aesthetics, really — you’re more likely to opt into some kind of sale if it’s presented in appetizing colors and eye-catching fonts. It’s all about associating the deals with the pleasing palette of the email itself. Additionally, marketers can make the entire message a hyperlink, significantly upping the click-through rates to increase traffic to their website (and social media platforms).

Consumers are accessing email while on the go.

One the best parts about email marketing plans is how they effectively become a way to contact a user no matter what he or she is doing in that moment. As smartphones have become pretty much ubiquitous, consumers are checking their email more often. In fact, one in three users admit as much. Some even have banner alerts or vibrations that signify when they receive a new message in their inbox. How much more direct can you get when it comes to customer interaction?

Around 97% of the population has an email address.

And of those users, 85% say that accessing it via mobile devices is either just as relevant or more relevant than doing it on a computer. Compared with SEO (which is limited to a smaller portion of web users) and social media (which is even more limited), email marketing plans have the most wide-ranging appeal because of how they can reach web users of all demographics. Plus, nearly half of all users who enjoy email marketing like it for the exclusive deals and discounts they can’t get anywhere else — in other words, the incentives.

So whether you tackle your campaign in-house or hire an outside agency and run it through white label email marketing, your small business simply can’t survive without email marketing — not for long, anyway.