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As social media initiates flirtation, email marketing is the honeymoon stage of a relationship as it helps you get to know the customer better, and you may end up with them or getting dumped. No one likes to get dumped, every unsubscribe hurts a little.
Most businesses, especially online businesses, rely on email marketing to send out announcements, offers and other news related to the brand to the customer base. Email marketing campaigns are comparatively easier to handle than other marketing strategies.
Let’s look at a few advantages and disadvantages of including email marketing in your marketing plan.
Advantages of Email Marketing
Here are a few pros of marketing your products or services through email campaigning.
Fastest Form of Communication
Email marketing is considered to be one of the fastest forms of communication, as it only requires uploading the information and clicking the send option, and boom! The message reaches directly to your target audience in a fraction of seconds. It is a considered highly-effective as it sends out time sensitive information, like a running promotion or a special tailored offer to the recipient very quickly.
Easy to Schedule & Organize
Email marketing campaigns allows the brand to have control over the kind of emails they would like to send, and the exact time the mails go out. You can schedule your mails over a period of time, such as 2 emails per week, which makes it easier for the audience to recall the brand as the business is ready to roll out a product launch, a planned sale or other time-sensitive events.
Promotes Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to the process of creation of content around a brand’s products and services for audience to read and enjoy. It is an effective way to communicate with the consumer base while driving loyalty and constant touch. Once a customer signs up to your email subscription, it allows the brand to tell their story, or introduce new products, or buzz them into upcoming events by sharing content with them directly.
Highly Cost Effective
All forms of online marketing come with some costs, but email marketing is amazingly cheaper compared to other methods such as PPC advertising. Rather than opting for expensive modes of communication to market your brand’s products and services, you should use things such as auto-responder software. The cost is as cheap as $50 a month, and scales based on the number of people in the email list.
Tracking & Reporting Ability
The email management software or the autoresponder comes with tracking and reporting functions of the email marketing campaign. This allows a better insight into the campaign and you can track the number of mails going out successfully, the number of mails opened by the recipients, number of clicks and conversions and much more. It helps the brand to understand their audience better and their expectations from the potential consumer base. It can also help in refining and reshaping your brand identity to create effect.
Highly Scalable & Flexible
The kind of email you wish to send to your potential consumer base is highly flexible as you can decide if you want to send just a plain text, or format them beautifully, or if you want to add lots of graphics and images, or if you wish to send attachments along with the mail to the recipients. You can also alter the email list by creating different groups as some mails might be relevant to some, while others might have a smaller sub-section of their own market. Either way, you can scale your campaign as per your wants and convenience.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Check out some cons of marketing products and services through email campaigns.
Deliverability Delays
In the email marketing world, deliverability of the message is everything and sometimes undelivered emails become an unavoidable issue. As time goes by, some of emails of the customers change or they might be inactive, or may have full inboxes. It is also possible that they put your mailing address into the spamming list, which is later filtered out by email software or service providers. So, make sure you avoid spamming your customers and you update your mailing list regularly in order to prevent deliverability issues.
Constant Spamming
Email marketing brings in spamming as a great risk as brands sometimes tend to send unsolicited emails and the recipients might not like the content, especially if your email list is unfiltered. You should also make sure that your emails have proper privacy and follow the data protection rules so that it makes your mails credible for the customers to go through and believe. Also, avoid sending too many mails at one time, as it might irritate the reader.
Preparing a Mailing List
For a start-up, preparing a mailing list could be really difficult as you need to earn subscribers. But, as more and more customers sign in to your website, you keep building your list. Make sure to connect with them regularly to put in every effort to build and maintain your email list. Add sign up forms to your website or blog or encourage the users to sign up for giveaways or promotional offers. It might take a while to build a targeted email list, but as you grow, you will begin to reap extreme benefits.
Threat to Your Website
Sometimes you do not follow the rules of not spamming your email marketing list and recipients as you end up sending them lots of mails all together. Because of such spamming, the readers tend to block your mail in their mail box and could also report your website by sending an alert to the web host or the mailing service company. If they end up ruling against your website, your website might be temporarily suspended or permanently shut.
Conclusion
If done right, email marketing could be really helpful to market your brand’s products and services, but could potentially go wrong if not done correctly. Start with building an authentic email list through content marketing & make sure to put in constant efforts to stay at top of the mind of the recipients.
Now you know why email marketing is so important for your brand, try it out!
