I'm convinced that Jupiter's prediction of a $1.2 Billion market for email marketing by 2008 (I think this stat is correct) is low. I continue to hear small businesses say they are dumping their postcard marketing for email because the ROI on postcards and other snail mail marketing aren't worth it anymore. What's driving the downtrend? A lot of things! What's going to force this trend off a cliff? Energy! The increase in energy prices will continue to force postal rate hikes leaving no choice for smaller businesses to search for other marketing mediums.
Smaller companies are not alone. Even though larger companies can absorb postal rate increases they won't sit idle long.
Just think about this Scenario:
Credit card company A sends 10,000,000 statements First Class bulk mail per month at a cost of $0.29 per statement for a Total Monthly Postage Cost of $2,900,000.
Congress approves a $0.02 postal rate increase
The new Total Monthly Postage Cost is $3,100,000 a $200,000 increase.
Total Annual Increase $2,400,000
That's big bucks. A simple two cent increase can cost a company $2.4M in postage. Email is starting to look very good for big companies. I think this market has a lot of growth behind it.