Why E-mail Marketing Is Old News
Email Marketing is a mode of direct marketing that
utilizes electronic mail technology. The technology serves
as a means of communicating and promoting commercial or
fundraising campaigns and messages to an audience over the
Internet. Email marketing is widely known as the
proliferation of emails. These emails are intended to
enhance the relationship between the business and the
current or potential customers.
These emails usually contain customer loyalty messages that
encourage repeat business. Sometimes, these messages also
allow prospective and existing customers to avail of certain
promotional campaigns or grab opportunities that will help
them gain more out of their purchases.
There are several advantages to email marketing. These
include the capability of distributing information on a wide
range of particular groups of prospective and existing
customers at a relatively minimal cost. It also allows
businesses to drive and press their promotional materials
through emails rather than waiting for these customers to
visit the website and view their advertorial messages.
Aside from email marketing being the second most effective
online marketing tactic next to search marketing, it is also
relatively easily to track. There are several softwares such
as web bugs, read-receipts, un-subscribes and bounce
messages that informs businesses if their promotional emails
were read or deleted without being read by their recipients.
These can be used to gauge and determine positive and
negative responses. It can also be used to associate sales
with marketing.
But despite these several advantages, email marketing have
also presented some disadvantages that led to companies
dropping this initiative as their chosen business marketing
tool. With the influx of companies sending unwanted and
unsolicited email to almost all email users, spam came
about. A lot of email users now tend to delete a lot of
promotional emails that they conclude as spam since it is
frequently difficult to determine whether an email is
legitimate or spam. In addition, there have been a lot of
instances where computer malware and spyware applications
were distributed through email. This is amongst the main
reasons why a lot of email users are turning down or
rejecting emails from unknown sources that have the
potential of infecting their computer systems and networks.
Due to the spam phenomenon, web developers have created spam
filters and spam blockers to protect email users from
receiving these unsolicited emails. Many legitimate
corporations complain that most of their promotional emails
get caught on these spam filters and puts efforts and costs
to waste.
In order to be successful in email marketing programs, the
business needs to know and promote awareness of the Spam
laws. These business institutions should also have the
capability of incorporating this with their email marketing
strategies.
But it has been a frustration for some companies whenever
they find out that once a user has tagged them as spam, they
will automatically be blacklisted and loose in the end of
the email marketing battle. This is regardless of the fact
that they integrate strict compliance with spam
regularizations and policies.
Aside from the already mentioned disadvantages of email
marketing, privacy has also become an issue with email
activities. Today, every email has to go through several
numbers of computers or servers before it actually reaches
the intended recipient. This potentially exposes the email
to the prying eyes of hackers who can physically tamper with
the content of the email.
But email marketing can still be a solid marketing tool
despite these challenges and disadvantages. This is only if
email is used tactfully and with appropriate strategies.
Email marketing has gone down in terms of popularity among
marketers, but it may not be long before an innovation
revolutionizes email marketing.
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