The Pros And Cons Of Email Marketing

Email marketing involves sending out series of automated or one-off message around a specific topic or event. Email marketing allows you to create targeted and personalized messages, build meaningful relationships with your customers and improve response rates to your direct marketing campaigns.

Whether your business already uses email marketing or you are yet to use email marketing, there are some pros and cons you should consider.

PROS OF EMAIL MARKETING

1. AFFORDABILITY: Unlike other online marketing options, email marketing is reasonably affordable, as the costs of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. With email marketing, there are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs, as the only cost you would make would be the initial costs of building a mailing list and investing in software, but after that, your costs will be minimal.

2. LARGE REACH: One of the top benefits of email marketing is how rapidly you can reach so many people in your target audience, compared to other online and digital marketing strategies that take time to reach large amounts of people. With email marketing, you can quickly get your message in front of thousands or even millions of people as fast as possible.

3. ABILITY TO TRACK YOUR EFFORTS: It is not enough to apply a strategy; you should be able to monitor your efforts and strategy to know if indeed it works. With the right tools, you can find out how many people open your emails and click on the attached links, in addition, you can evaluate the success of a campaign by using web analytics software, and this helps you optimize future campaigns.

4. PERSONALIZATION: One of the top ways to reach your customers is through personalized messages, and with email marketing, you can send personalize messages easily to your target audience. In addition, you can also segment your marketing list, so that your customers receive messages from you that they are interested in as well.

1. NOT REACHING THE RIGHT AUDIENCE: Irrespective of the number of persons on your mailing list, if they are not your target audience, you’d end up sending mails to the wrong audience, and your email marketing campaign won’t be very successful. Make sure the people on your list are potential leads before you spend time and resources on your email marketing campaign.

2. EMAILS COULD END UP AS SPAM MESSAGES: This is another disadvantage of email marketing, especially when you are not sending these mails to the right audience, because they tend to delete your email, unsubscribe and mark your email as spam. In addition, if you send emails too frequently, people will unsubscribe from your emails altogether. You need to make sure that your email marketing complies with privacy and data protection rules, and that it is targeted properly at people who want to receive it.

3. RESOURCES AND SKILLS: In order to make your email campaign a successful one, you must guarantee that you have the right copy, design and marketing list. On the other hand, if you do not have the necessary resources and skills, you might have to outsource some or all of the resources and skills needed.

4. UNDELIVERED EMAILS: When your emails are not arranged and designed properly, chances are that such emails might not be delivered, especially when they contain certain spam keywords or characters in the subject heading or content of the email. In addition, if you don’t keep your marketing lists up to date, you will find incorrect email addresses, and that means your messages won’t reach the right persons.

Email marketing can be a very effective way of reaching your audience in an affordable and timely way, however, email marketing does have some drawbacks. If you have considered these pros and cons, then you can decide if email marketing is a good fit for your business, and seek ways to overcome the disadvantages of the media to meet your goals.