I often receive emails from Amazon for their new deals or offers about once a week ever since I’ve bought a few things from there. Amazon would keep the record of whatever products you purchase then email with similar choice or just any deal they are having at the time. However, I always mark these emails and delete them as spams since I hardly ever open them. There is a reason for this is because I only buy stuffs online only when I need to or I know they would be cheaper online.
As from the sample email from Amazon below which I just received today, excepts from their title with my name, their content is somewhat not very much personalised. They could instead of writing: “Dear Amazon.co.uk Customer” by my name, it would make me feel closer to them. Their template of the email is quite simple and clear which is plain and jejune in my opinion. It would make the readers to lose interest in finding out what is next. The layout of their homepage is quite the same as I only find the search tool is the most useful part since I can easily look for what I need.
On the other hand, as McCloskey (2006) believes that email marketing is an important communication tool between businesses and their customers in term of building trust and maintaining closer relationships. It helps to attract more existing customers to come back and view the products and maybe more new potential customers. Although businesses should put in mind the border line between a permission-based email and spams (Ellis-Chadwick et al, 2012) which may cause some bad impressions and annoyance for the receivers.
More on email marketing:
Ellis-Chadwick, Fiona and Doherty, Neil F. (2012). Web advertising: the role of email marketing. Journal of
Business Research, 65(6), pp. 843–848.
McCloskey, W. (2006) E-mail Data Source, Retail White Paper, New York.