Email Marketing is one of the most renowned marketing strategies in the world. Thousands upon thousands of companies are using emails to keep in touch, build a relationship, and market to their existing customers, along with potential customers. In this article, I will outline the pros and cons of email marketing.
Pros
- Cheap – Most email marketing software will only charge you a small fee, depending on the size of your list, and then it won’t cost you anything from then on. Others, however, will charge you annually, but this is still cheap, considering the return you could get!
- Easy to Manage – Once you have input all your contact’s email addresses (usually you can import them from an excel file), all you have to do is add the rest as and when you get them. Also, an email marketing campaign is also easy to manage in the way that you can see all of the stats of your email, eg. how many bounced, how many opened, how many clicked your links, etc.
- Saves Time – Even if you had a list as small as 100 contacts, how much time would it take you to ring each of them? Let’s say 3 minutes each, so 5 hours!! With email marketing, you take maybe an hour designing your email, and then send it off. So you’ve just saved yourself 4 hours. Easy!
- Directing Traffic – Emails are great for directing traffic, especially if you are tactical about the time you send it out. I usually like to send mine out at about 11, so most people open it on their lunches, and are more likely to click through. Another good time is on a Friday afternoon, when everyone is distracted from their work, thinking about the weekend!
- Reach – You can reach millions of people, without spending any more time or effort than you would if you were emailing 100 people!
Cons
- Need to be a good writer – You don’t need to be the best in the world, but you do need to be able to know what will captivate your audience’s attention, and how best to word your sentences to optimise click-throughs. There are ways around this, however; you could hire an experienced writer. While this will cost more, the return on your emails should easily cover this.
- Spam – The worst possible outcome of an email marketing campaign is to be labelled a spammer. This could possibly affect your reputation, and all you need is one miserable reader, or even someone who glances at your subject line, and before opening it, marks it as spam. There are ways to overcome this; most email marketing software has an anti-spam check, which will tell you how highly your email ranks in terms of spam. The higher, the worst. Try avoiding words like free, money, and other spammy words that you probably see in your inbox all the time.