Email marketing is still an effective marketing strategy in today’s fast-evolving of social and digital media marketing campaigns. Many companies and businesses still employ email marketing as their main marketing and promotional campaign. Today, we’ll discuss email marketing and its advantages and disadvantages.
Table of Contents
What is Email Marketing
Email marketing is the process of transmitting commercial marketing messages to a group of customers via email. Broadly speaking, every email companies and businesses send to their customers falls under the category of email marketing. They usually comprise donations, sales requests, business requests, and advertisements.
The email marketing strategy plans to achieve three main objectives; brand awareness, trust, and establishing brand loyalty. However, the purpose of sending emails is to improve the merchant’s relationship with its customers (current or previous), sharing 3rd party advertisements, convincing customers to make the immediate purchase, attracting new customers, and encouraging customers’ loyalty so that they would make a repetitive purchase.
Email Marketing Statistics
Some of the main statistics of email marketing are as follows;
- Approximately 87% of the B2B marketers utilize email marketing for their distribution channels.
- Roundabout 79% of the B2C marketers and bloggers depend on email marketing to spread their articles.
- 70% of the whopping professionals employ emails to share the information relevant to their industry or company.
- Aside from the worldwide social media usage, approximately 4.03 billion people used email in 2020 across the globe.
- According to an estimate, the total number of emails would reach 4.48 billion by the end of 2024.
- The average email conversion rate is roundabout 1.2% in 2021, and it’s that you make one sale out of 100 emails.
Advantages of Email Marketing
Some of the main benefits of email marketing are as follows;
Real-Time Marketing
Email marketing allows you to connect with your target customers in real-time. For instance, you can use trigger points to approach the right audience. Like shipping cart abandonment, recent purchasing, web activity, and other triggering elements provide you an opportunity to target the right audience, at the right time, at the right place, and offer them the right offer.
Saves Time
The automated tools allow you to send an email to the customers relevant to any of the activities they did on your website. The automated email could comprise of a number of things like a welcome note for signing up, discount offers or shopping offers if they’ve abandoned the cart. The first thing you should do is to develop a template, then you could use it for various purposes.
Eco-Friendly
Email marketing is eco-friendlier than other types of marketing. Here you don’t have to spend resources like fuel on traveling, printing, etc. like traditional marketing methods.
Not disturbing
Unlike telemarketing or door-to-door marketing, email marketing doesn’t disturb people. They can read the email anytime whenever they’re free. It provides customers an option either to receive the email or unsubscribe if they don’t like receiving the emails.
Testing it before
A number of elements in the email like images, email copy, messages, personalization, CTA, subject line, and others allow you to make sure that your content is effective.
Benchmarking
There are many free tools available online to benchmark your email marketing campaign. You should check it out in the search engine. However, it allows you to cross benchmark your performance relevant to the industry, so that you could see the differences and improve the performance.
Measuring
Web analytic applications allow you to measure the performance of your email campaign. Such measuring tools allow you to experiment with various things like design, subject line, or copy in order to check which is more effective.
Higher Conversion Rate
If your business is promoting new offers via email marketing along with the CTA link, the interested customers would click on the link and make the purchase. The good thing about email marketing is that you can launch it at every stage of the purchase process. It allows you to influence the decision-making process of customers.
Easy Sharing
It’s very convenient to share the content in the email through the forward or share option, and sharing is a great way of word-to-mouth marketing. Once your content goes viral, it would bring a lot of new customers.
Personalization
Email marketing is the best way to send a personalized marketing message. In fact, you can further categorize your customer’s lists based on their interests and send them relevant email content. It would help you to amplify your sale to a great extent.
Scaling
Whether it’s a smaller segment of the market or a large portion of the customer market, email marketing would help you to achieve your goals.
Design Flexibility
Email marketing provides you a lot of flexibility over the design of the email. You can use graphics, plain text, or a file in the attachment. You should choose whatever is relevant to your marketing message.
Permission-Based
You give people a choice either to receive a message or unsubscribe at any time. However, your email list comprises those people who chose to be there. It means whenever you send them promotional offers, it’s highly probable they would show interest.
Cost-Effective
Email marketing is one of the cheapest forms of marketing. Here you don’t have to spend money on the spacing, timing, printing, or advertising fee.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Some of the main disadvantages of email marketing are as follows;
Expertise & Resources
If you want to run a successful email marketing campaign, then you should have the right marketing expertise, design skill, and copyrights. If you lack these skills and expertise, then you would have to hire someone or outsource your work. Either way, it would cost your business a lot.
Size Problems
The email size plays a significant role. It means that you would have to use graphics and adding all the detail, and keeping your email size minimum. However, if you fail to keep the email size low, then it would take a lot of time to load and you’ll end up losing your customers.
Designing Issues
Your email design should be appropriate and work well on various devices like mobile phones, tablets, and desktops. It’s possible that you would find some difficulty between functionality and the design. However, you should also check that how your email would appear without graphics because some users only allow text emails.
Undelivered Emails
You should keep your marketing list updated. It means you should avoid entering the wrong email address because it wouldn’t be delivered. Most importantly, you should appropriately design the email and avoid using spam keywords, irrelevant links, and certain phrases like click here, free this, etc. The email service provider usually filters out such emails and puts them in the spam, and the target customer won’t see your email.
Spam
The irritant or the commercial emails fall under the category of spamming. That’s why you should carefully send emails to those people who have shown interest in your website. The click rate on the untargeted emails is very low.
Conclusions
After a careful study of the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing, we’ve concluded that email marketing is a very effective strategy. You should carefully design your email of the right size and sent it to the right address so that it won’t end up in the spam.
