The Advantages of Email Marketing

Most of us have come to associate email marketing with ‘spamming.’ Further, to many of us, email marketing is all about those virtually desperate ‘offers’ we receive in our inboxes, regarding various medications, get rich quick schemes, and so on. Coming from such a background, we would never be inclined to take the whole concept of email marketing seriously.

Yet, the truth of the matter is that email marketing – when properly done - is one of the most effective online marketing approaches one can use. In some estimates, it is reckoned that a properly leveraged email marketing campaign can be more beneficial than, for instance, an equally well leveraged pay per click advertising campaign. You come to appreciate the truthfulness of that assertion when you suspend the equalization of email marketing with ‘spamming’ and make a real effort to learn how true email marketing actually works.

How email marketing works

There are several implementations of email marketing. There is, for instance, the one where as a business you create a newsletter. You then offer it for free to potential clients, in exchange for them supplying you with their email addresses at subscription time. Thereafter, you would be sending them editions of the newsletter through email, and occasional product offers. In such a situation, as long as it is valuable product offers you give them, the people in question would be bound to eventually make a purchase – and your marketing effort would have worked out.

Another implementation is where you get into a deal with a lead generation company to be supplying you with emails of prospects, whom you can then (occasionally) target with product offers. As long as you don’t do it too frequently, and as long as what you get a emails of real leads (people who have expressed a genuine interest in the product), it wouldn’t qualify to be termed as spamming.

There is yet another implementation where you simply buy email lists from firms that collect them, and send offers to the owners of the emails. This comes closer to spamming, but there are some people who argue that as long as you do it decently and not too frequently, you wouldn’t be guilty of the same – especially where the email collection was consensual, and preceded by assessment of needs. That way, you wouldn’t be trying to sell a product email recipients aren’t absolutely interested in.

vWe have also seen a trend where companies with pay per click (and pay per impression) advertising programs which also run web-based email services, such as Google and Yahoo can allow you to post adverts in people’s email pages. Normally, the program scans the emails, identifies what they are all about and things that their owners would probably be interested in, and then targets them with relevant adverts. Strictly speaking, this would qualify to be termed as email marketing too.

The main advantages of email marketing

One of the biggest advantages of email marketing lies in its effectiveness. This arises out of the fact that it is a very highly targeted advertising approach. That is especially the case where the email owners to be targeted have been born of a proper lead generation program. These are people who are very likely to buy, and the email is, really, just a final link in the chain. This distinguishes email marketing from other approaches where you target people who would never buy the product you are selling, even if their lives depended on it.

Another advantage associated with email marketing is that it can be personalized, for the recipients – increasing chances of conversion. Email marketing also turns out to be a very cost effective marketing approach. Granted, the number of email recipients who convert into buyers may be small, but that still tends to be a bigger number than that of PPC clickers who convert into buyers, for instance. And, of course, the cost of sending a single email ,which is almost negligible, cannot be compared to the cost of posting PPC ads – even where the pricing of email marketing includes lead generation costs.