Email Marketing - Definition & Example
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email as its medium of communication to reach out to its customers. Email marketing can be used for multiple reasons such as sales promotion, brand awareness, advertisement, newsletters, maintaining or building relationships with customers and much more as per the need of the promoter.
Email marketing has an advantage over broadcast messages to everyone. It is a method of direct marketing in which the promoter can target its customers or potential customers and can customize the email content which would suit the recipient better. Email marketing can contain simple texts, multimedia images, animations and all sorts of creative tools to focus the attention of the recipient towards the message.
Email Marketing Strategy & Objectives
Email marketing has the following strategies to fulfill the following objectives.
1. Direct Sales
2. Acquisition & Retention
3. Branding
4. Traffic Generation
5. Customer Engagement
6. Referral
Advantages of Email Marketing
The aim here is direct and simple i.e. to attract the attention of the consumer and convey your message. Email marketing has many advantages such as
1. Email marketing uses email as its medium which has a very large user base and as a result the emails can reach to a greater number of customers. Anyone using any multimedia device has an email account so it becomes quite efficient that the emails get addressed to once in a while
2. Highly cost effective. Given the ratio of customizability in addition to reach over the costs involved, email marketing is highly cost effective than traditional marketing techniques
3. It has a high chance of getting attention since emails persist in the accounts of the recipients unless they remove it by their own. This increases the probability of at least opening the email once and reading the content as compared to the low probability of content being delivered through common media broadcasts
4. Email can be content rich. Since emails can store large amount of data as content, much of the important message can be conveyed through it which gets lost through common media broadcasts. Email marketing can stretch from giving out specific sales information to a new product description or starter kits.
5. Every email can be customized. There would be some minimal costs involved but each and every email can be customized as per the need of the promoter and the target audience. This creates high chances of converting possible leads into active customers
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
However this highly efficient method of marketing comes with some shortfalls.
1. The primary disadvantage of email marketing is being treated as a spam. Often the marketing emails that are received end up in the spam section of the mail because of the wrong approach used by the promoter or some algorithm of the mail service provider which automatically assumes some emails to contain unnecessary information.
2. The second drawback of email marketing would be the target customers. Sometimes in order to save costs of acquiring email ids of the target customers, promoters choose the option of buying the email ids from a third vendor.
3. Bulk email ids contain certain addresses which are redundant for the company and their use but they still receive the emails because of common broadcasts. This creates the problem of losing your message in the crowd and finally this broadcast gets picked up by the mail providers and deemed as spam.
Example of Email Marketing
For example let’s consider a famous online retailer which has launched a ‘new season sale’ and wants to attract customers for its website. The retailer can approach email marketing and can send customized emails highlighting the sales perspective combined with the images of specific products such as shoes, mobile phones, apparels etc. from each category. Then a link for the website can be provided alongside the multimedia messages so that the recipient could check out the opportunity.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Email Marketing along with its overview.
This article has been researched & authored by the Business Concepts Team. It has been reviewed & published by the MBA Skool Team. The content on MBA Skool has been created for educational & academic purpose only.
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