If a business does not take email marketing seriously, it could fail or give misleading information, it is believed.

Founder of Sign-Up.to Matt McNeil explained that when using email marketing, small businesses in IT must utilise insight gathered through regular interaction with customers and continue to compile this.

That is because an organisation can make as many assumptions as they like, yet live data must always be embraced to see if people will respond to any campaigns, he added.

Mr McNeil noted that a different approach must also be adopted when targeting varying demographics, though age is no longer a major deciding factor as others can be "more demanding" and want savvier marketing techniques.

He concluded: "It is also important to make your messages personalised for your particular audience especially for groups that are perhaps less responsive, so you may want to consider making the campaign more relevant and rewarding to them."

Recently, Gareth Langston of Sign-Up.to explained on the company blog that Facebook is often seen as a hard thing to customise for marketing, when in reality the applications are able to help organisations do all kinds of adverts.

A recent Connect survey found that the two major concerns about outsourcing services like IT support were 'loss of control' (56 per cent) and 'budget over-runs' (43 per cent).