Email Marketing

E-mail marketing is a form of electronic advertising that uses e-mail to communicate and advertise to a target audience. It refers to the e-mail correspondence sent to establish or develop communication lines with fellow merchants, e-mail sent for acquiring new customers or e-mails convincing customers to purchase a product. This is considered one of the most effective e-mail strategies second only to search engine marketing. 

Advantages of E-mail Marketing 

This e-mail strategy is cheaper and far more convenient than traditional advertising strategies. Business owners can easily send out bulk mails according to a target population using a mailing list, without having to spend on postal fees and shipping costs. E-mails get to their intended recipients in minutes, compared to mailed advertisements that take days to be delivered. This strategy has a worldwide reach, which broadens the prospective customer base of the company.

Mass e-mailing has the added advantage of being an environment-friendly method of advertising. Because everything is done electronically, no paper is wasted. This type of marketing is also less of a hassle to potential customers, because merchants only send out their e-mails to those who have expressed their consent to receive them.

E-mail marketing is easy to tract with the use of auto responders, web bugs, unsubscribe requests and other mechanisms. Through these methods the company can determine the number of positive or negative responses and to correlate the sales with marketing. 

Disadvantages of E-mail Marketing

This form of marketing comes with the added hassle of being associated with spam or unsolicited bulk e-mail. With the sheer number of illegal spamming activities it is easy for Internet system administrators to mistake legitimate marketing campaigns as spam. Because of these, legitimate marketing correspondence often end up rejected or filtered by their intended recipients. Filtering of legit e-mails even happens with opt-in e-mail advertising, when the customer has given his or her permission to receive the e-mails.

E-mail Marketing and Direct Marketing

This kind of online marketing is more often than not compared to its more primitive counterpart, direct marketing. This involves snail mail and a lot of paper, which is the reason why direct marketing is slowly losing its relevance on today's electronic world. Printing and paper costs, shipping and mailing costs, not to mention the difficulty in tracking positive and negative responses are just some of the things that make direct mail marketing lag significantly behind e-mail marketing. Direct mail marketing is also commonly associated with junk mail, which most recipients tend to throw away without opening.