Email Marketing…

It is one of the forms of direct marketing where in electronic mail is used as a means of communicating the commercial or for fundraising messages to a selected audience. In layman terms you could define e-mail marketing as a process in which a mail is sent to a current or prospective customer. More precisely the term is used in reference to actions like:

- Trying to encourage repeat business and gain customer loyalty with current and previous customers via enhancing relationships through sending electronic mails.

- Sending mails electronically with the goal of acquiring new customers or to convince the existing and current customers to buy something immediately from them.

- Addition of advertisements in the mails which were sent by other companies to their current and existing customers.

The industry for e-mail marketing has spread so much that, only in US where it started initially, the US firms alone spent more than $400 million in 2006.

What are the benefits of E-Mail marketing?

E-Mail marketing has gained a lot of popularity due to several reasons. One of the major reasons is the cost advantage, as with email marketing you can distribute information to a wide range of existing and prospective customers through a mailing list with very little expenses. Even when compared to other media like direct mail and printed news letter email is less expensive. It comes second only to search marketing in the line of most effective online marketing strategies and can let you track the exact return on investment which is also very high. Another aspect which is very important is the time factor. The time it takes of delivery for email is extremely short when compared to mailed advertisements. As opposed to website marketing you don’t need to wait for the customer to visit your website, an advertiser using e-mail marketing can push the message to the intended audience. Also the email messages are easy to track via services like auto responders, web bugs, bounce messages, read receipts, unsubscribe requests, click-through etc and more. These tracking means and mechanisms can also help measure open rates, positive and negative responses and also to help correlate sales with marketing. By using E-mail marketing advertisers can generate repeat business automatically and very affordably. They can also reach a substantial number of subscribers via email who have opted to receive communications through email on subjects of interest to them. They can benefit from over half of internet users who check or send email every day. With going green on a rise, email marketing supports the cause as it is paper free i.e. green and with tracking and response metrics it will enable tuning and optimization of the email marketing channel by making use of process of testing different variants and calculation of statistically significant results.

However there are a number of disadvantages to email marketing like in some cases company’s send bulk emails also called spam’s which are not wanted by many customers and are a source of irritation. Such illicit email marketing practices predate and kill legitimate email marketing strategies. As a resolution, Opt-in email advertising has come in to picture, also known as permission marketing where in the recipient of the advertising has given his consent to receive it. It certainly goes a long way in eliminating the disadvantages of email marketing. Even with its set of disadvantages the numerous benefits associated with email marketing cannot be neglected and are an asset for a company or firm.