When someone talks about email marketing, it is often related to the complaint about the hundreds of emails everyone receives on a daily basis.

The most important thing for a marketer is that when he writes an email, he needs to ask himself if as a complete stranger he will open this email and if it will add any value in his day (Todd, 2012).

Mohammadi et al. (2013) define email marketing as a strategy that involves advertising and promotional messages to current and prospective customers. And also, the use of email by a company to promote its products and services and to develop a relationship with its current customers or potential ones.

Researchers have distinguished many goals of email marketing strategy, in the way the company wants to enhance the relationship with its customers and encourage customer loyalty (Mohammadi et al, 2013). Oliver (1999), Mao (2010) and Bose and Rao (2011) define customer loyalty as the customer’s commitment to a brand, with repurchase behavior of products and services from the company.

Another goal can be to attract new customers or make current customers buy more products online (Mohammadi et al, 2013).

For an email campaign to be effective, it is important that the message is relevant and personal for the customer. It doesn’t matter that the company has a database of one million email contacts or only hundreds of contact if the message is not relevant and don’t add any value to the customers.

According to Ryan (2014), it can be great for a company to test their email campaign over groups of subscribers in order to gauge the success of the campaign. That means, sending some email versions to clients by using different design or subject line for example and see which one is more effective.

You can find here 7 tips for an effective marketing strategy!

https://www.shopify.co.uk/guides/email-marketing/strategies?rodeo_token=a15c417e-0765-4379-8d43-05feac6941b8

Here you can see an example of email campaign where the brand pushes the audience to buy products thanks to a free delivery for any purchase of £20 or more.

Another example where the brand proposes different products to buy for Mother’s Day. This email also try to motivate the clients to buy more by showing them products of their shop.

Both of these emails are pushing the client to buy and can be seen as too intrusive by the target audience.

Instead of only sending a promotional email, brands can also send useful information depending on the industry in which it competes. A sports brand can send workout tips to its customers in order to keep in touch with them and make them remember the brand without being intrusive by pushing the target audience to buy. These types of informational emails will add more value for the client rather than a promotional one.

Just here, found brilliants examples of email marketing campaigns:

https://mailbakery.com/blog/email-marketing-campaign-examples/

About the pros of this strategy, the most important is that emailing is an inexpensive way to reach your clients and advertise your brand and very easy to set up.

One of the other advantages of this strategy is that it is easy to have statistics and measure its efficiency.

But, how exactly the company can control these e-mail campaigns? In order to check the effectiveness and the receptiveness of their audience, companies can look at the open rate, click through rate, unsubscribe rate and the forward/share rate for example.

Last but not least, email campaigns are time-saving for companies. Indeed, a marketing email can be created in hours and will after reaching a lot of people in a very short time.

Although, this type of email campaign strategy have also cons.

It is really easy for subscribers to unsubscribe if the emails are annoying or don’t deliver a great content.

Moreover, people receive a lot of emails every day and often don’t read it and delete it directly or the email could get into the subscriber’s spam folder.

The company puts its reputation on the line when creating an email campaign. Indeed, the Sender Reputation score, based on bounce rate, unsubscribe rate or email drop in spam can slash if the email is badly considered by the subscribers.

We can highlight the most common mistakes made by marketers when writing an email campaign.

The most common one is when they send email to someone that didn’t give is permission for, you can be sure that the person will unsubscribe. Then it is having a wrong subject line, you need to make it simple so that the customer would want to open your email. And finally, as said before, you need to test your email before sending it.

Read more about email marketing strategy here:

https://www.superoffice.com/blog/email-marketing-strategy/

– Brighton University student

References

Bose, S. and Rao, V.G. (2011) “Perceived benefits of customer loyalty programs: validating the scale in the Indian context”, Management & Marketing Challenges for the Knowledge Society, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 543-560 [Online]

Available at:

http://www.managementmarketing.ro/pdf/articole/242.pdf [Accessed 17^th February]

Gurr, J. (2014) “The Pros and Cons of Creating an E-Newsletter for your Clients“, Iceberg Web Design [Online]

Available at:

https://www.icebergwebdesign.com/2014/08/pros-cons-creating-e-newsletter-clients/ https://www.icebergwebdesign.com/2014/08/pros-cons-creating-e-newsletter-clients/ [Accessed 20^th February]

Oliver, R.L. (1999) “Whence Consumer Loyalty?”, Journal of Marketing, vol. 63, pp. 33–44. JSTOR [Online]

Available at:

www.jstor.org/stable/1252099 [Accessed 18^th February]

Mao, J. (2010) “Customer brand loyalty”, International journal of business and management, Vol. 5, No. 7 [Online] [Accessed 18^th February]

Mohammadi, M. et al. (2013) “Email Marketing as a Popular Type of Small Business Advertisement: A Short Review”, Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences [Online] [Accessed 17^th February]

Paterson, J. (2014) “Email marketing: Explaining the power – and risk – of reputation building“, My Customer [Online]

Available at:

https://www.mycustomer.com/marketing/technology/email-marketing-explaining-the-power-and-risk-of-reputation-building

Ryan, D. (2014) “Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation“, London, Kogan Page [Online] [Accessed 23^th February]

Root, G.N. (2018), “Pros & Cons of Email Marketing“, Small Business Chron [Online]

Available at:
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/pros-cons-email-marketing-1448.html [Accessed 20^th February]

Todd, B. (2012) “Is anybody out there? Four strategies for email marketing success”, The Canadian Manager, Vol. 37, Iss. 3. [Online]

Available at:

https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/docview/1350377152/fulltext/43F8D09402614B8EPQ/1?accountid=9727 [Accessed 17^th February]