What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a method of promoting businesses through the Internet, by sending emails to people. These people are usually present on a list that might be created through a lead generation technique. The aims of email marketing could be varied. These could be:
- Directly promoting a product and interesting the recipient in visiting the website of the business
- Creating awareness of some newly introduced feature in an existing product
- Calling upon people to introduce new people in return of certain incentives
- Interesting recipients in products and opportunities of affiliated businesses in a bid to bring in residual income, etc.
This technique is used by big as well as small businesses and in most cases, the business emails could be helpful to the receivers. These emails could also take the form of newsletters which may or may not be directly inviting people for some business.
What are the Pros of Email Marketing?
Since most marketers will send the emails to a previously generated list of people, the method is less effort-intensive. There will be effort needed to create the copy of the email but other than that, it is a largely automated process. Tracking is possible through autoresponders. These will tell the email sender if any action has been taken. Hence, manual tracking is not needed.
There is usually an instant reply for email marketing because of the speed with which emails are sent. All other methods of marketing – over the Internet or otherwise – can take a lot of time materializing into prospects.
What are the Cons of Email Marketing?
There is a very thin line between email marketing and spamming and this line can very easily be crossed. Action against spammers is quite strict, including legal recourse. The marketing needs to be subtle and done in a way that it provides some value to the receivers.
The emails can be filtered out automatically and end in junk folders. If that happens, there will be no use of this campaign. It is necessary to strictly adhere to anti-spamming rules.
