Email marketing. Few B2B marketing tactics have been as beleaguered. The “email is dead!” battle cry rang strong for a few years, but now we’re hearing it much less frequently. It’s become universally accepted that email is here to stay. Not only that, marketers are realizing it’s an incredibly viable ‒ and valuable ‒ way to reach both prospective and loyal customers.

Email is the go-to way to communicate with all subscribers or shoppers in the most clear and concise way. In fact, B2B marketers agree that email marketing is crucial to their business and 40x more effective than social media for generating leads. You read that correctly: It’s forty times more effective.

And those numbers will only continue to grow. The current estimate is that there are 100 billion business emails being sent every day, and the number of business email accounts is expected to rise to 4.9 billion by the end of this year.

In the B2B world, email is particularly useful, as it allows for a longer “life-span” for communication, at least in comparison to social media or other forms of messaging and interaction. That means it brings you more time to make a sale or close a deal. With the rise of marketing automation programs, behavior-based email, and highly personalized segmentation, B2B marketers realize that email marketing is, and will likely continue to be, the best communication channel in terms of return on investment. In fact, 68% of companies consider email ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ and companies credit email for bringing in 23% of total sales.

So, how are brands using email and these automation technologies to their best advantage? Let’s take a look at four brands that have figured out how to maximize email marketing and turn it into one of their best, most business-savvy advantages.