Email marketing is used heavily in many industries. If you aren’t familiar with this marketing strategy, it is the practice of sending out marketing materials to your target markets through email.
Whether your company already uses email marketing or you are trying to decide if it’s a good strategy for you, there are some pros and cons you should consider.
Pros.
Quick and larger reach:
It’s incredible how quickly you can reach so many people in your target market with email marketing. With many other online and digital marketing strategies, it takes time to reach large amounts of people. With an email, you can quickly get your message in front of thousands or even millions of people.
Easy tracking: Email marketing is very conducive to tracking and measurement. With the right tools, you can find out how many people open your emails and click on the embedded links. If you segment your lists you can compare data to find out which of your markets are more likely to respond to your calls to action.
Affordability: Compared to a lot of other online marketing options, email marketing is relatively affordable. Paid advertisements and even some SEO strategies can be very expensive when they are used long term. Email marketing is also much more affordable then direct mail campaigns. With email marketing, you’ll have the initial costs of building a mailing list and investing in software, but after that your costs will be minimal.
Flexibility: you can send plain text, graphics or attach files – whichever suits your message best. A choice of design options gives you scope to convey your business branding.
Cons.
Your Email could be marked as spam: commercial email or ‘spam’ irritates consumers. If your messages aren’t targeted to the right people, the recipient may delete your email or unsubscribe. You need to make sure that your email marketing complies with privacy and data protection rules, and that it is properly targeted at people who want to receive it.
Limited creativity: Your digital marketing strategy likely consists of all kinds of tactics that were created with a wide range of creative ideas. Email marketing can restrict the creativeness of an ad or even a campaign if it relies on your email ads.
It can be easily ignored: There will always be a group of people who think the emails are past. Personally, I check the email every day (Primary tab), but still, I know lots of people who don’t check their inbox at all.
The truth is that they sometimes download an eBook (in exchange for an email), but they never check the inbox folder.