As a business, when you have a product or service to sell, you need to start letting people know the same. You need to find right audience and then tell them about your products and services and why your products and services are great for them. In this article, let us see why email marketing is a great way to do exactly the same.
Why email marketing?
Email marketing has many advantages over other traditional marketing systems and some online internet business models too.
Advantages of email marketing
Some advantages of email marketing are as below.
Low cost
Email marketing is a lot cheaper than many other online internet business models. Low cost is a huge advantage of email marketing as compared to direct mail marketing.
Email marketing does not involve any printing or postage expenses. With email marketing you can save lots of money which you would otherwise spend on paper, ink, post office charges etc. Whether you want to do it all by yourself or hire an email marketing agency, email marketing will cost you only a tiny fraction of what other marketing models can cost you.
Direct to customer
With email marketing, you can directly reach your buyers or potential buyers with very little effort. You can directly send your marketing offer to a potential customer’s inbox rather than waiting for leads to arrive on your website and pick your offer.
Maximum reach
With email marketing it is easy to reach substantially high number of people. With a single email, you can reach as many people as you have on your email marketing list.
The number of people that have access to internet is very high and more than half of them check their emails regularly. Thus, there are lots of people that use email on a daily basis. You just need their permission to send marketing emails to them.
This way email marketing allows you to get your marketing message across to more number of people than any other business model.
Personalised and dynamic approach
With a good email marketing system, you can organise your email lists very meaningfully. As your leads respond or not respond to your marketing messages you can move your email contacts from one group to another.
This means you can always send personalised email messages that suit your audience. You can also dynamically alter your approach by adapting your email messages to suit ever changing customer behaviour.
Auto response
Advanced features in email marketing tools provide you the option to activate auto response to customer actions.
For example, when a customer has made a purchase, you can set an auto response to say a thank you and make an offer for future purchases. Or, when a customer added few items to basket but left your website without making a purchase, you can have an auto response sent with a gentle email message asking them if there is anything you can do to help them close the purchase.
Easy to track and measure
As you do everything electronically in email marketing, you can track and measure the performance of your email campaigns easily. Email marketing systems allow you track and measure real time performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Once you send out emails, you can track every single email. You can see if your email has been delivered or not, when it was delivered, opened or not, when it was opened. You can also see if your email was deleted before it was even read. Data such as the number of emails delivered, opened or deleted gives you an instant idea on how effective your email marketing campaigns are being.
Metrics such as click through rate tell you how many people have actually clicked on the marketing links in your emails. When your emails have links to products or websites, a good email marketing system allows to see which links have been clicked on. Advanced analytics help you figure out which marketing tactics are working as planned and which are not. Based on these you can make changes to your email marketing tactics and strategies to improve conversions.
Environment friendly
Email marketing is good for environment as it saves lots of paper and ink. As opposed to email marketing, direct mail marketing involves paper copies of colourfully printed leaflets and brochures delivered to buyers’ homes. The paper and ink along with plastic packaging can be very harmful to the environment.
High RoI and success rate
Return of Investment is very high from email marketing than other online internet business models. Because of the nature of email marketing business, it is possible to track and measure exact email marketing ROI accurately.
With email marketing, it is possible to target well defined audience who are most likely to convert. This means the success rate of email marketing is much higher than other online internet business models.
Better than social media
Experts say email marketing has better chances of getting your message in front of the audience than other online internet business models.
For example in social media marketing, if your post or advert reaches someone’s social media timeline when they were away, it is most likely that they will not see it.
If someone has been away and returns after sometime, it is unlikely that they would scroll back to check all posts they have missed when they were away. But if your message was in an email, it is more likely that they will scroll back to see all unread mail when they are back.
Summary | Advantages of email marketing
It is true that email marketing has many advantages over other online internet business models. Such advantages of email marketing as we have seen above and many more make email marketing wonderful for any marketing business.
There is no doubt that email marketing is great and you can definitely make good money from email marketing. However, email marketing does bring with it some challenges or disadvantages too. You just need to raise to these challenges to make email marketing work. You may find this interesting to read.
Challenges of email marketing
Listed below are some of the challenges of email marketing. There is no need to be disheartened about these challenges or disadvantages of email marketing. You just need to overcome the challenges of email marketing and reap the benefits of email marketing for your business.
Subscription and consent
Email marketing is a great way to reach a large number of potential customers very quickly and easily. But this does not mean you can send emails to anyone you wish.
In many countries there are strict guidelines for businesses on email marketing. Many countries have introduced laws that prevent a business from sending emails to people without prior permission. This means if you are running an email marketing business, you need to seek permission from your potential customers before you can send them marketing emails.
Normally businesses seek such permission on websites or social media by offering opt-in forms to subscribe to emails.
Spam
Often marketing emails end up in spam folders of your target customers. This may be due to the way their mail box is configured or people manually deleting or moving emails to spam to avoid being distracted. Some people may incorrectly mark your emails as marketing scam and delete them. some people may even consider your marketing emails as spam and hold it against your reputation.
When someone perceives your email as unwanted or spam, you risk losing that lead or customer. This makes it challenging for a business to make their emails appealing to such people.
However, it is not very easy to create a marketing campaign that appeals to all the readers when you send the same email to many people. People also get so many marketing emails these days and it is very hard to standout of the crowd and be noticed. One way to overcome this is to prepare few variants of an email and test which ones work the best and use only the best.
Unsubscribe or opt-out
Many countries have introduced laws that make it mandatory for companies to provide an opt-out or unsubscribe option in every email they send out.
The purpose of such a law is to let people have more control on what they can allow to enter into their mail box. This means you need to provide an option to opt-out or unsubscribe in every email you send out. As a result, with every marketing email that you send out you risk losing a subscriber while you hope for a sale. This makes email marketing more challenging.
Identified as advertisement
There are few laws that make it compulsory for marketing emails to be categorically marked as advertisements. This law aims to protect the interests of email recipients by letting them know that someone is trying to sell something to them for a profit or commission.
In many countries law also states that the To and From parties of an email must be clearly identified.
Physical address
Some countries insist every marketing email must also mention the valid physical address of the business. This may be a challenge if you are running your email marketing business with no physical address or keep moving around few locations.
Demands creativity and patience
Mastering email marketing strategies and tactics needs some creativity and takes time and needs patience.
You will need creativity to plan, design and prepare marketing messages that engage well with the right audience. This may take some time to finalise your email marketing strategy and then you will need more time to test your email marketing tactics. Moreover, technology that is needed for email marketing is always changing and you need to master it. You cannot afford to get frustrated with all this.
How to start email marketing business?
It can be very quick and easy to start email marketing business. You do not even need any special technical skills or programming experience too. You just need to understand how emails work and have a keen interest in online internet business.
To start email marketing business, many people start with email marketing strategy, then build an email list. While the email list picks up, it is important to design and prepare emails and plan various types of email campaigns. Once you have reasonable number of emails in your email lists, you can start sending out emails. Then you need to track and measure the performance of your email campaigns. Adjusting the email campaigns based on email marketing analytics and scaling your email marketing business can take your internet income journey to great heights.
