Email marketing is still new compared to other traditional marketing, but marketers still think it is still a effective marketing method. For instance, The Radicati Group found out that worldwide revenues for the Email Market in 2014 is $12 billion and estimate to increase more nearly 50% revenue in 2018 [9]

One of the market researches shows that the organization may gets as high as return of more than 40 times for $1 that the marketers invested [7] [8]. So more than 65% of marketers think that the email delivers an ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ return on investment [1].

Today, we will research about some basic knowledge of Email Marketing and the first thing need to do is defining Email marketing.

Definition: Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using electronic mail to send promotion or build customer relationship or brand awareness among potential customers [5].

Some example of email marketing:

The Bonobs’s email is a email campaign that encourages the customers to take action. This email is a good example for marketing campaign because its simple, attractive and convinient for customers. So it will increase the ability that the customer will take action and it still looks good even the customer use mobile to check email [3].

I think the email from Litmus is quite interesting because it used swipe motion for eye-catching and make people curious about the content of email. However, I am not sure that the email can still load perfectly on the mobile phone because the motion may not be supported.

There are some advantages of email marketing[ 2]:

1. Low cost: the cost for email marketing is lower than other types of marketing
2. Save time: Email do not required lots of time to create or send like video, newspaper, advertising,etc
3. Target marketing: The business can use email marketing to send a suitable and personally email to their customer based on customer segment such as demographic, lifestyle, etc.

For example, Amazon often send email that related to personal interest or search history of recipient.

4. Brand awareness: The consumers have subscribers the business’ email which give the business permission to send email, So the business can send email to customers to encourage potential customers to take action or at least make the brand or product stay on their mind.

5. Increase purchasing: The email marketing is still a good method to achieve or increase the sale even that your products/services sell only in an actual store. Also according to ExactTarget’s 2009 Channel Preference Study, the email marketing can encourage more than 50% customers to buy products/services [6].

For example, the business often send email about promotion before special day such as Christmas, Black Friday,etc and the customers’ demand at that time is high, so the potential customers will purchase or at least consider about buying the products.

6. Build loyalty: all the business want to turn a new customer into loyalty customer, but they should not forget to maintain the current customers. So the email marketing can also be use to build and keep the customer loyalty. As an example, the Boots send email about the advantage card to current customers and remind the customer about their existing points that they can use to purchase.

The first limitation is increasing email marketing list, so the business should find ways to make people willing to subscribes to their email list. Then the business should focus more about how to make the “lightboxes” without make the customers feel annoy or frustrate. The “lightbox”is a small box that pop-up in the website to encourage people register for receive email from the business [10].

Other limitation is how to prevent people to opt out your subscriber list and some main reasons for it is because the business send too much email that may be mark as spam or people do not interest about the email anymore. Then the business can try new way to make the email more appealing such as using Video campaign in email. They also need to improve their email to make it be more mobile-friendly because mobile phone become a personal things that everyone can have and they spend lots of time with it.

Overall, I think that email marketing is a good marketing method because it is suitable for all kind of business, lower cost, save time and it is high return on investment. However, it still has some limitation like limited ability to grow email list and customers like other marketing methods such as using social media. But if the business spend more time and effort to invest the email marketing, I think those limitations are not a big issue.

Reference:

1. Adestra, ‘2014 Email Marketing Census – email is number 1 for ROI’,
2014. [Online]. Available:
<http://www.adestra.com/resources/downloadable-reports/2014-emailmarketing-industry-census/.> [Accessed 31st Jan 2016]
2. Bawm, Z. L & Nath, R. P. D (2014) A Conceptual Model for Effective Email Marketing. 17th International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (ICCIT). [Online]. Avalaible: < http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=7073103> [Accessed 31st Jan 2016]
3. Carly, S. (2015) 16 Examples of Awesome Email Marketing Campaigns. Hubspot. [Online] available: < http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32854/10-Simply-Awesome-Examples-of-Email-Marketing.aspx>
4.Joe,M (2013). 6 essential benefits of email marketing. Fusionfarm. [Online] Available: < http://blog.fusionfarm.com/blog/six-essential-benefits-of-email-marketing> [Accessed 31st Jan 2016]
5. Marketing Runner (2016) Email Marketing-Traction Channel #9. [Online] Available: <https://marketingrunner.com/email-marketing-traction-channel-9/> [Accessed 31st Jan 2016]
6. Morgan, S. (2009). Is Email Marketing Endangered?. Exact target. [Online] Available: < http://assets.exacttarget.com/legacy/uploadedfiles/Resources/Whitepapers/ExactTarget_EmailUtilization.pdf.> [Accessed 31st Jan 2016]
7. S. Jenkins, The truth about email marketing. Upper Saddle River, N.J.:
FT Press, 2009.
8. GetResponse, ‘Email Marketing Secrets Guide’, 2008. [Online].
Available: <http://www.getresponse.com/documents/core/whitepapers/Email_Marketing_Secrets_Guide.pdf.> [Accessed 31st Jan 2016]
9.Radicati Team, ‘The Radicati Group, Inc. Email Market, 2014-2018’,
Radicati.com, 2014. [Online]. Available:
<http://www.radicati.com/?p=12482.> [Accessed 31st Jan 2016]
10. Shireen, Q. (2015) Forecast: Top 4 Email Challenges Your Enterprise Will Face in 2016. Benchmark.[Online] Available: <http://www.benchmarkemail.com/blogs/detail/forecast-top-4-email-challenges-your-enterprise-will-face-in-2016> [Accessed 31st Jan 2016]