What is Email Marketing?

Email Marketing is the means of communicating viable messages to an audience through the use of electronic mail (a.k.a. email). The purpose of this type of marketing is to enhance the relationship between the advertiser, and their current or past customers. In some instances it may be used as a tool to acquire new customers. The main objective is to maintain and encourage customer loyalty, thus creating a reoccurrence of consumers.

What’s the Big Deal?

This particular means of marketing has been made popular in part by the fact that sending an email is much cheaper than most forms of communication. For those that do it right, email marketing has proven to be very successful. The internet has been the fastest growing marketing medium in the past few years. More and more consumers spend their time online rather than reading a newspaper or magazine, even watching TV or listening to the radio. With the right message, and the most prominent target market, email marketing can help continuously achieve a high response rate for certain products or services.

The Optimism Within

When choosing to communicate to consumers via email marketing there is a vast array of advantages. Emails will reach anyone you are targeting no matter who they are, or where they are in the world. The costs associated in the design and execution of an email ad is far less expensive than that of its newspaper or magazine counterparts. It takes less time and resources to utilize email marketing. Email also enables the user to personalize every message.

With technology the way it is today, measuring the results of an email marketing campaign has been made extremely easy. Software allows the user to measure click-through-rates, how many impressions were made and much more. This advanced technology makes it easier for the advertiser to know if the campaign they are running is at all successful, or if it needs to be adjusted. Email marketing allows for a faster response. While direct mail takes a few days to reach its destination, email takes only a few seconds to get from one person to the next. All in all, email marketing is a very simple method. You don’t need a variety of resources. You can sit at home and create an email and send it off with the click of a button.

Too Good to Be True

With all that banter about how great email marketing is, it definitely has its drawbacks. The major sting is that companies considering the use of email marketing should be aware that there are spam laws and permission rules that guide the use of emails. What is spam? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, spam is “unsolicited, usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses.” In 2003, the United States passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM). This law sets the standards for sending commercial email, and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions. Although this law seems heavy enough, advertisers longing to send commercial emails must also be given permission from the consumer to receive such emails. Essentially, if you don’t have this permission, then the recipients of your mail will regard your message as spam. If you are accused of sending spam, then the FTC could close your email accounts, and even shut down your website. If this happens, your reputation may be tarnished. Hopefully, those facts don’t deter you from choosing to use email marketing. Most business owners have a strong knowledge of the laws before they begin their campaign.

One last downfall of email marketing is that only a certain amount of emails will actually be delivered. Of the emails that are delivered, most of them will likely be rejected or filtered. Still, there are a vast array of emails that go through, and consumers will respond positively to them. Laws aside, if your email marketing campaign complies with all the rules set by the government you should have no problem getting a response from your consumer.

Is Email Marketing Suitable for You?

Email marketing can be very rewarding in the end. It is one of the simplest forms of advertising, as well as one of the most cost effective. Most agencies, like ours, send out a formal newsletter each month to our customers. This is a great way for you to reach your consumers through email marketing. With a little creative flare, and some graphic touches, emails can be very fun and provide an immensely positive response rate. Though there are laws that act as parameters to email marketing, when abided by, the campaign can still be very effective. There are many avenues to marketing; email marketing is only one of them.