Email is a free and simple way for consumers to be contacted by business to keep ongoing reminders of their products or services new and/or old. The question posed is whether “email marketing is an effective way of marketing your business”.
Email marketing has taken a back seat to new marketing techniques such as social media and has been described as outdated (Steiner, 2016). Steiner (2016) states there are reasons why email marketing is no longer effective:
1. Marketers do not know the customers they are marketing to, blind sales pitches no longer work with customers. Emails are not personalized and need to segment.
2. Most emails subject lines are not effective enough to gain a reaction from consumers and when they do react businesses are not monitoring results of email marketing such as conversion rate.
3. Outdated email addresses result in wasted time, as they are not making contacting with the intended recipient. Marketers may believe they have contact addresses for say: 100,000 businesses when 50% of these businesses may no longer be trading or the email address are out of date.
It is not only Steiner (2016) that highlights the disadvantages to email marketing but also Forneris (2009). Forneris covers points such as the lack of engagement by consumers mentioned by Steiner (2016) but adds to the arguments by mentioning the introduction of spam filters, which acts as another unfortunate barrier to email marketing. Even if companies manage to get an attention grabbing ‘subject’ line, many consumers will not see the subject line due to it being automatically discarded into the ‘spam’ or more recently the ‘junk mail’ folder. Both Steiner (2016) and Forneris (2009) do not completely disregard that email marketing has its uses however they focus on the downsides.
Shewan (2014), on the other hand, believes that email marketing is an effective way of marketing. He states that although email marketing has a bad reputation it is still effective and has lost it’s appeal due to marketers being seduced by social media, as the ‘cool’ thing of the moment. Email marketing may not be the most talked about topic at present but it still remains the cornerstone of many businesses marketing campaign. Despite supporting email marketing Shewan (2014) acknowledges that many email newsletters are regarded as ‘rubbish’ not worth reading, however some can really grab user attention and still generate business. With the assistance of email newsletter platforms such as “Constant Contact” and “MailChimp”, businesses are able to get very detailed statistics on the interactions with emails and direct traffic to a website (Gurr, 2014). Email marketing gets business’ brand image out there to the right people at the right time. The emails can be sent to a certain demographic at a certain time without wasting time advertising to everyone with the hope of getting someone (Gurr, 2014).
A combination of email marketing and social media can be an extremely effective marketing strategy with social media’s rapid growth and the total number of worldwide email accounts expected to increase to over 4.3 billion accounts by year-end 2016 (The Radicti Group, Inc, 2016). Evidence of email marketing’s effectiveness is shown when consumer were asked to opt-in to receive updates from a company, only 10% elected to do so through Facebook, while 90% chose to receive email newsletters (Neilsen, 2010). Email marketing despite being seen as old school in comparison to new social media marketing, it is a cost effective way of getting business data to be seen by consumers.
When getting personal information from consumers an email address is the minimum details you would expect to be given. This shows it is easy to access the information to market in this way. However, the effectiveness of the email marketing campaign is specific to the businesses using it.
References
Shewan, D. (2014). Is Email Marketing Effective? Three Examples That Prove It Is | WordStream. [online] Wordstream.com. Available at: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/11/12/is-email-marketing-effective [Accessed 23 Apr. 2016].
Steiner, D. (2016). 6 Reasons Your Email Marketing Efforts Are Not Effective. [online] Entrepreneur. Available at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/253802 [Accessed 23 Apr. 2016].
Forneris, J. (2009). The Disadvantages of Email Marketing. [online] Smallbusiness.chron.com. Available at: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/disadvantages-email-marketing-3472.html [Accessed 24 Apr. 2016].
THE RADICATI GROUP, INC, (2016). Email Statistics Report, 2012-2016. [online] THE RADICATI GROUP, INC. Available at: http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Email-Statistics-Report-2012-2016-Executive-Summary.pdf [Accessed 24 Apr. 2016].
Neilsen, J. (2010). E-Mail Newsletters: Increasing Usability. [online] Nngroup.com. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/e-mail-newsletters-usability/ [Accessed 25 Apr. 2016].
Gurr, J. (2014). Pros and Cons of E-mail Marketing | Iceberg Web Design. [online] Iceberg Web Design. Available at: http://www.icebergwebdesign.com/2014/08/pros-cons-creating-e-newsletter-clients/ [Accessed 25 Apr. 2016].