This is a form of direct marketing where a marketer uses emails to promote their products and services. Having said that, what are the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing?
Buckle up and let’s find out.
Advantages Of Email Marketing
- Cost-effective
- Flexible
- Higher sales
- Time-saving
- Scalable
- Measurable
Cost-effective
Email marketing is arguably one of the most pocket-friendly channels of marketing. You do not necessarily have to pay huge fees that you generally incur when you reach your audience online.
Infact,a single promotional email can be sent to thousands of clients with little personalization and not spending a fortune. The only thing you need is an operational email account and some basic messaging skills to design the perfect email.
Most businesses have an automated email set up to engage their customers. In most cases it costs nearly nothing except in cases where a company acquires an email automation software.
Flexible Designs
Far from cost-effectiveness, another major advantage of using email marketing is the kind of flexibility it offers. You may probably be wondering how email marketing again becomes flexible.
Now, in terms of message and content type, it is wide. We can compare it to a social media post where you can attach PNG files, plain text, infographics, link to videos, or even include a feedback form.
Most of the email accounts are also accompanied by a number of features that are particularly suitable for branding.
You’re given an advantage of including your social media handles and logo so that your clients can get to know you even better.
Higher Sales
If properly done, email marketing can result in huge sales. E-commerce platforms are known to use email marketing in order to promote occasional offers and discounts before their frequent clients.
You can as well improve your sales by sending more email messages to prospective customers. Often times, such promotional messages include an instruction to press certain links which can get the reader to the desired landing page.
If in case you intend to promote a discount offer on specific items or are running a seasonal campaign, you can just include a call-to-action button so that visitors are simply directed to the product page.
Time-Saving
Email marketing is not only a flexible channel of marketing but will help you save a lot of time and the result can be seen almost immediately.
It takes very little time to compose an email and automatically send it to many clients as you wish. Infact, if you’ve got the skills and experience and have got the email templates ready, there’s just little work on your part which is to compose the main message.
Once you’ve come up with a template, it can be used in several email campaigns. Even if you decide to hire somebody, the prices involved is not so much labour-intensive. Time is “money” and so your precious time saved can be employed on other equally profitable businesses.
Scalable
Email marketing is perfect whether you want to reach a large audience or small targeted groups. You can start with a small target group as you learn your market and then scale up to a large audience later on. This is perfect as you can still use the same materials and designs for this growth.
In fact, it is the best marketing tool because you will reach your audience no matter where they are and what kind of device they are using. Unlike other marketing channels like television commercials and billboards, email marketing allows you to communicate with your customers in real-time.
Measurable
The results of your campaign are quantifiable. This is one of the various reasons why email marketing is a great marketing platform for your business because you can keep track of real-time results using google analytics.
You will see how many people are opening, reading, and reacting to your email content. You can as well use these reports to leverage your campaign. See what works for you, and what doesn’t, and determine if you need to change the strategy.
Disadvantages Of Email Marketing
- It’s hard to gain attention
- Undelivered emails
- Frustration
- Size and design issues
- Spam
- Resources Intensive
- Building a mailing list
- Customer privacy and security issues
It’s Hard To Gain Attention
As we speak, email marketing is one of the most common and also most abused forms of online marketing. A big number of businesses employ this method to reach new clients.
Most of these are untargeted and irrelevant information where marketers obtain a marketing list from quacks and send the same directly to their customers without considering the preferences of the individual recipients.
Such are the messages which readers mark as spam. In a case where there is almost no probability that a client will even notice your email, getting attention is the most difficult task.
Undelivered Emails
When using email marketing, you must always be smart to make sure that your messages are delivered.
Certain emails that use some spam characters or keywords under the subject heading or even the main content of the email are likely to be singled out by internet service providers or even email softwares.
Spam characters and keywords like $$,€¥€,FREE,WIN or click here are usually problematic.
Again, if you are too lazy to update your marketing lists, then you will probably find incorrect email addresses and your emails will therefore not reach your targeted clients.
It therefore requires close and regular monitoring or else you mess up.
Frustration
Have you ever felt frustrated by some emails that keep jumping to your inbox every now and then? Many email marketing agencies tend to send so many emails to clients and do not provide necessary links for them to unsubscribe.
At times, when these marketing agencies get access to an email list, they take advantage of sending irrelevant messages for every product too often that may make readers lose interest.
Email marketers sometimes go to the extent of invading the privacy of individual users which is illegal for a client who may have trusted you with their email address and contact information.
Size And Design Issues
There are a number of important considerations to put forth in order to make your email marketing campaign a success.
You must check on the design, nature, content as well as the size of your email to make it attractive, engaging and eye catching. Files should also be small enough to allow for quick download.
Emails containing large files and images may take too long to download thus frustrating your clients and even make them lose interest.
Apart from the content size and even color, there are other factors too which should be considered to make an email marketing campaign successful.
Spam
The truth is, no one likes commercial emails (Spam). If it is not targeted to the right people, it irritates the consumers. That why many servers have an email filters to help the consumer reduce the number of ‘spam’ emails received.
It’s advisable to study and understand your target market before you start an email campaign. Only properly targeted people should receive your email. Otherwise, your email could land in the recipients’ spam folder and never see the right of day.
Worse still, you could land in severe legal problems. The CAN-SPAM Act sets the privacy and protection rules that every company should follow in their email campaigns.
Resources Intensive
You need to have the right mailing list, the right tools, and the correct email design for your email marketing campaign to be successful. You cannot just wake up one day and start email marketing. It takes a lot of time and effort to build the right resources for email marketing.
Launching an email campaign also costs money. If you do not have the required in-house skill, you will need to outsource the services to a professional, which can cost you to the tune of several thousand dollars. A lot of patience also goes into making email marketing successful. Just because you sent an email doesn’t mean that sales will start coming in immediately. When starting, be patient and understand that it will take time to get the desired result. It is a learning process.
Building A Mailing List
Building a mailing list is not easy. It means getting subscribers, and it takes time and effort. You need to have a business website with sign up forms and create engaging content that will attract enough visitors to sign up.
This doesn’t happen overnight. You need to patiently invest your time and resources to create a targeted mailing list that converts.
To maintain the mailing list needs even more work. If a subscriber signed up to receive your marketing email, it means that something attracted them to sign-up. You still need to maintain their interest to keep them from unsubscribing. Please keep doing what made them subscribe in the first place.
Customer Privacy And Security Issues
Emails are prone to hacking and malware. This is magnified exponentially when you market on a large scale. It increases the risk of spoofs, malware, and phishing.
Malware is bad, and hackers know how to disguise it as a normal email. Malware includes key loggers, spyware, adware, etc. When you are doing your email campaign, you need to take proper precautions against this because it can even shut down your campaign.
Spoofs are forgeries that make emails look like they are coming from your company. Cybercriminals love this. They create duplicates of realistic imitations of existing company brands. From this, they can even gain access to sensitive login credentials and online payment information.
Phishing is when cybercriminals pretend to be a business or a customer and extract personal information and data from the other party. They use this information to defraud the customer or sometimes even the company. This can cause severe damage to your business.
Therefore, it is essential to educate yourself on the dangers and the correct mitigation strategies before you start your email campaign. There are various ways to protect yourself, including VPN, enabled firewalls, encrypted emails, etc.
One last thing about email marketing
Now, in as much as email marketing may appear to be cheap and simple, it’s an art which requires suitable design skills and targeting methods in order to be a success.
It’s worth noting that not all email marketing campaigns will turn out to be successful. Most of them fail because of simple things; wrong targeting market and poor content.
Businesses trying to operate email campaigns must know how to select their audience and only target the right persons.
In other words, to be successful in your email marketing campaigns, you must simply put into consideration all aspects of email marketing.
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What are email marketing advantages and disadvantages?
Email marketing is a fast and cost-effective method of getting new customers and also retaining existing ones. One of the disadvantages of email marketing is sometimes, the email recipients will not open the emails or they might go into the spam folder
What are the advantages of email marketing?
Here are 10 advantages of email marketing.
Reach a global audience.
Easy to share.
Easy to measure.
Easy to get started.
Drive revenue.
Deliver targeted messages.
Reach an already engaged audience.
Low costs. One of the most obvious advantages of email marketing is its lower cost compared to mainstream marketing channels.
What are the 4 types of marketing emails?
They include; Informational emails, Digital newsletters, product update emails, transactional emails