Email marketing is still used by many entrepreneurs, what are its characteristics, its advantages and disadvantages?
Based on the study realized by ContactLab about email marketing in 2011, Internet users in five European countries (Italy, France, UK, Germany and Spain) receive an average of 28 emails per day and tuse two mailboxes of emails per capita. From these emails they receive every day, a high percentage of them are spam, which are eliminated by 72% of users without even open any of them. As a counterpart, the majority of study participants are registered to a high number of newsletters: from three to ten. In these times, email marketing still works?
Since its inception in the 70s, the email has become a media that is effective and faster than the ordinary post. Fewer and fewer people or companies are using the post for their communication and the tendency is to completely replace its use by the email. In the 90s it expanded the use of email marketing a very popular tool used for a purpose to make known our branding and company, which currently remains in force.
What is it?
It is the use of email to publicize our company or brand. These emails may contain information about new products, news, releases, any kind of information, etc. Its purpose is to have contact with the customers to get their loyalty.
What are its advantages?
Customers do not always visit our page, so if there is the need to communicate something important and interesting is probably that not everyone can learn it. One solution to this is email marketing, which takes you directly to the inbox of the clients email. It’s a very inexpensive marketing strategy that allows accurately measure the effectiveness of a campaign by analyzing the reasons for success or failure. You can create accurate reports: how many people opened our email, how many clicked on it and accessed to our website, how many forwarded email, etc. It has a great virality through integration with social networks and can provide immediate answers to users. It is an easy tool to manage prospects and customers that have a good cost-benefit value.
And its disadvantages?
The major disadvantage of email marketing is that the send email can be not reach to the hands of the public. This can be happened because of a mismanagement of email marketing. This mismanagement is to send emails to users who have not given us permission to do so. In these cases, these emails are identified as spam so it is likely that they are automatically deleted by users. Another thing that can happen is that the email addresses of our public are incorrect and this can be corrected by asking again to our subscriber for the email by other way. In order for email marketing can work properly it is necessary that the information contained in the email to be interesting to your audience and to convey ideas properly and shortly, the information we provide needs to be incentive for the users to go to visit our website.
Email marketing today
Contrary to many predictions, the use of email marketing is growing. According to the DMA report of 2012, the strategic value of email marketing has increased over 90% in 2011. It represented 10% or less of the marketing budget, but it demanded a slightly higher than the 2010 budget. Vendors expressed far less concern about email marketing than in previous years and were much more positive about social networks as a complementary channel to their email. 62% of the vendors in this study described themselves as satisfied or very satisfied with their email marketing program.