Email marketing is a marketing method that allows businesses to regularly update both existing customers and potential new ones with new products, discounts, and other relevant information. These email databases are acquired by interested consumers signing up via the company website.

Advantages

Scalability

Companies are able to scale their e-newsletters to specific audiences. An example of this would be Samsung emailing Galaxy Note 7 customers only, informing them of the decision to recall the handsets due to faulty batteries. For more information regarding this recall, please see here.

Another example of specific audience targeting would be Nando’s sending an e-newsletter to Brighton based customers only to inform them of the opening of a new store located in Brighton Marina.

Sharable

The nature of email allows recipients to simply share e-newsletters by forwarding them, which in turn enables companies to potentially benefit from eWOM and also viral marketing. (Sterne & Priore, 2000)

Measurable

The measurability of email marketing allows companies to produce statistics, such as the open rate of the email. This is something that allows organizations to experiment with different copy, subject lines and design, to see which is most effective.

The way in which these e-newsletters can be measured isn’t restricted solely to who opens the emails. The campaigns can also be measured by what time during the day/week each customer opens the e-newsletter. This is something that enables businesses to segment their email campaigns and send them to certain customers at certain points during the day/week.

Less Intrusive

Unlike telephone marketing, email recipients can read company updates at their convenience, which makes them feel more comfortable and under less pressure. Another positive to this is the fact that, again businesses can then see when their customers open their e-newsletters, which allows them to maximize their open rates by sending the emails to certain audiences depending on the time they like to click through on to the email copy.

Cost-effective

Due to the fact that there are no printing or media space costs, email marketing can cost much less than other marketing methods. The only cost for a majority of companies is the monthly cost for the maintenance of their email database.

Disadvantages

Spam

Unsolicited commercial email or ‘spam’ irritates consumers. If e-newsletters aren’t sent to the correct audiences, it may result in the recipient deleting the email or even unsubscribing from the database. This can have a detrimental effect on the company’s ‘reach’ in regards to their e-newsletters.

Undelivered Emails

There are a number of things that businesses need to take into account when sending out an e-newsletter to their database due to the risk of it not being delivered. One of which would be the use of certain spam words. If these are used, email software and Internet service providers will filter the email and prevent it from arriving in the user’s inbox, which therefore has a negative impact on the purpose of email marketing campaigns.

As you can see below, there are still a number of relatively high-profile organizations that are using certain spam words, which prevents the email from landing in the recipient’s inbox and is alternatively delivered to their ‘spam’ inbox.

Design Issues

E-newsletters must be designed in such a way that enables it to be viewed on a number of devices, ranging from laptops, tablets and smartphones. If the emails aren’t formatted correctly, users won’t be able to view the email, therefore deeming the e-newsletter useless. File sizes are also something that needs to be considered, due to the fact that if the images embedded in the e-newsletter are of a large size, the email will take significantly longer to load, therefore losing the interest of the recipient.

Resources & Skills

For successful email campaigns, businesses must ensure that they have the right copy, design and database. If organizations don’t have the resources and skills in-house, they would need to outsource some of these elements, which would result in an extra cost.

Despite the average open-rate for all industries being at only 24.79%, if done efficiently, email marketing can be a very low-cost way of not only keeping your customers in the know in regards to discount offers, new products and new services but it also makes customers feel valued in regards to your correspondence with them (Chaffey, 2016). For further statistics across industries in terms of email marketing, please click here.

As long as the design of all email campaigns is optimized to be clear and visible on all devices and designed to stay out of recipients’ spam folders, email marketing is something that can be extremely useful, regardless of the industry that a company is in. (Sterne & Priore, 2000)

References

Chaffey, D. (2016). Email marketing statistics 2017 compilation. [online] Smart Insights. Available at: http://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/ [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].

Samsung, (2017). Galaxy Note7 Safety Recall and Exchange Program. [online] Samsung Electronics. Available at: http://www.samsung.com/us/note7recall/ [Accessed 13 Apr. 2017].

Sterne, J. and Priore, A. (2000). Email Marketing. 1st ed. Hoboken: Wiley [Imprint].