Pop quiz! Approximately how much of the electronic mail that exists on the web is pure spam? If you’re guessing anything under 97%, you’re underestimating the power of these spam-bots. That’s an important statistic to come to grips with, so try to visualize it as a pie — everything is spam except for the few crumbs leftover when the whole thing’s gone.

But that doesn’t mean that email is some kind of floundering medium. On the contrary, email marketing has shown its effectiveness over both SEO and social media strategies, mainly because people tend to check their inboxes quite frequently. That means more opportunities to get their eyes on valuable business information. If you’re a small business and you haven’t taken advantage of email marketing yet, you’re behind the times. Of course, as you’ll come to find out, there’s a fine line between spamming and sending well-crafted, engaging and useful content to your customer base.

Nearly half of all customers were influenced by promotional emails last year.

The data doesn’t lie. About 44% of users last year made some kind of purchasing decision based on information they received in a marketing email from a company whose updates they’d subscribed to. As important a number as that is, it’s actually secondary to this one: 77% of users want updates on products and services as long as they give their permission for it first. That’s a huge consideration to keep in mind because it separates regular email marketing plans from straight-up spam.

Approximately 90% of businesses use email marketing for company updates.

You might think that customers aren’t interested in a business’ birthday or some other milestone they’re celebrating. But it’s worth sending out that email anyway because of how it serves as a brand reminder to customers who might not have heard from that particular company in a while. This kind of web based email marketing is essential for keeping ties with customers, and as long as they’ve signed on to receive this kind of information, they’re likely to embrace it, even if it’s just by viewing the subject line alone.

Email information is easily shared on social media.

Try an experiment with your next email marketing plan. Place buttons inside the text of the email that users can click to share the information via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google Plus and other social media networks. Studies show this typically yields a 158% higher click-through rate than typical text inside the body of the email. It’s this kind of engagement that users love, so give them the ability to share the kinds of deals they want to share.

Email marketing plans are consistently growing.

Though it’s already an established part of companies’ overall agendas everywhere, email marketing is still on the rise. In fact, it’s one of the main areas companies said they’d like to expand their services in, second only to social media. And with 3.2 billion email accounts currently operating on the planet, the return on investment is looking pretty darn good. So here’s to emailing responsibly and never becoming a spammer. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.