Pros and Cons of Email Marketing
As an entrepreneur or a marketer, your success lies very much in what you can control and one of the most powerful and valuable things that you own and control is your email marketing list. The growing acceptance of permission-based email marketing has turned what was once considered a spammer’s tactics into an important strategy for businesses of all sizes.
Today’s consumers are bombarded with messages every instant, every day. From traditional media like TV, and radio, to social media, online marketing, online videos and of course email marketing space.
The amount of communication that people are exposed to continues to increase each and every day. To stand out in this crowded world, both online and offline is more difficult than ever. To complicate the matter is the constant changing of rules, particularly in the social media and search engine optimization space by big players like Facebook and Google.
To be successful, business owners and marketers must be extremely agile and ready to adapt to these ever-changing rules. This takes time, effort and money and with most forms of marketing, there is no guarantee that it will work. To cut through all these noises, Email marketing is the solution.
If you follow the rules of email marketing, attract the right target audiences and send those people relevant messages, your efforts will pay off in the form of increased brand awareness, word-of-mouth marketing, brand loyalty and sales. And the best part, it doesn’t have to be expensive.
Email marketing has become an essential part of any business even if yours is a microbusiness or you’re a solopreneur with an extremely small budget, email marketing is still a priority for you.
Why? Because email is where most people prefer to get news from companies about their promotions, discounts updates and more.
Remember, the power is on the list. You just need to learn how to build the list and use it to turn subscribers into paying customers and brand advocates. True, Email Marketing is one of the most cost-effective investments you can make to promote your products and services but it is not perfect.
Advantages of Email Marketing
Affordability
From Radical’s 2020 Email Statistic Report, billions of emails are sent every day, 306 billion to be exact and this is going to be increased to 361 billion by end of 2024. Email marketing service providers ( MailChimp, Aweber, Get Response etc) usually offer their software at low monthly fees. They might charge you based on the number of subscribers on your list, the number of messages you send per month or a combination of both. Prices are usually low and increase as you add more subscribers to your list or send a higher number of messages.
Effectiveness
From Radical’s 2020 Email Statistic Report, for every dollar spend on email marketing, the average return is $36, of course, this return isn’t guaranteed. And email is being used by almost 4 billion people worldwide, half of the world's population. You need to tweak and optimize your campaigns to make them achievable. Nowadays, people are more willing to receive email messages from businesses and are twice as willing to sign up to a business email list than they are to interact with a business on Facebook. In other words, despite all the hype that Facebook marketing gets, consumers are more engaged with email marketing. Whether you’re using email marketing to drive more website traffic or increase conversion and sales, email marketing is an important part of your marketing plan.
Measurability
Most email marketing tools give you access to a lot of data about your subscribers and their behaviours. For example, you can quickly learn who opened your email message and clicked the links in your message. From here, you can test your email campaigns, such as subject line, time of delivery and more. When you set up email automation sequences, you can even track where people fell out of your marketing funnel and you can then develop new ways to bring them in again.
You can even integrate your email marketing tool with Google Analytics to do a more in-depth study of your subscribers’ behaviours. The information you collect can help you to create better email campaigns as well as retarget your campaigns.
Customization and Personalisation
Email marketing applications make it easy for you to customize your email messages. You can change the layout, the font, images etc to match your brand and appeal to your audience. Many applications provide easy drag-and-drop design editors so you can create a highly professional email message quickly.
Personalised email messages often generate higher open and click-through rates. You can test personalising the subject line of your email messages by adding the recipient’s name or you can test personalising the greeting within the body of the message (such as “Dear Jane”). However, personalization doesn’t always work perfectly but if you’re confident that your list contains accurate recipient names, it could make a big difference in the success of your campaign.
Segmentation
It is important to know to who are you sending the email messages? You need to know where they are in your marketing funnel, and what they want or need from you, to continue pushing them through the funnel. An email marketing application that provides segmentation features allows you to segment by a variety of factors such as age, geographic locations, birth date, anniversary date, gender, average order, date of last purchase etc. You can segment your list of subscribers and send them targeted email messages based on the criteria you choose. For example, you can set up email automation that sends a coupon to customers a few days before their birthday. This is a great way to capture their attention and increase loyalty.
Segmentation can increase open rates, click-throughs and conversions. For example, you can set up a sequence that sends emails to your list of customers that offers a special price on a product on sale. Those recipients who click on the link in the mail to get the offer are taken to a special landing page where they can click on the “buy” button to make a purchase. Those who make the purchase would then be segmented separately from those who didn’t. The buyers will receive a follow-up email sequence offering related products and services while the non-buyers will receive reminders that the discount is expiring soon. You can get very complex in your segmentation and automation processes in an effort to increase conversions.
Relationship and Trust Building
One of the most important aspects of building a successful business is building a brand that consumers recognize and trust. Email marketing gives you the opportunity to showcase your authority on the subject matter so consumers trust that you know what you are talking about. They’ll develop a perception of your brand based on the email messages that you send and when the time comes and they are ready to make a purchase, they’ll choose your brand.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to nurture leads until they are ready to act and make a purchase. As they become more comfortable with your brand and from the information you send, it helps them solve a problem, saves them time or simply makes their lives a little better, they are more likely to spread the word about your brand to other people. Email messages are highly shareable and it takes just a second for a recipient to click the forward button to send your message to another person.
Time-saving
Once you set up your email marketing with all tools in place, you can save a big amount of your time on a daily basis. Rather than manually sending thank you notes, confirmation offers etc to people, you can set everything up in advance, turn it on and let it run by itself. It’s important to test your automation from time to time to ensure nothing goes wrong. No technology is perfect so better to be safe than sorry. Add your name to the automation list and see what happens. If there is something wrong, fix it immediately. A poorly developed, written or configured email message could do more harm to your business than good.
Disadvantages of Email Marketing
Even though there are some negative aspects, this should not deter you from using email marketing. Regardless of the challenges, it’s still one of the most effective ways of promoting your products and services to consumers and motivating them to take action, such as making a purchase. However, it is also important to understand the disadvantage so you are aware and not be surprised down the road. They include the following:
Deliverability
Two things can affect the deliverability of your email messages. The first is spam. Internet service providers (ISPs) that deliver the message to email inboxes are actively looking for spam and they’ll either stop it before it reaches a recipient or sends it to a recipient’s spam folder if the message is suspicious. The other problem is your email marketing service provider. Some have a better reputation than others and those better ones have better deliverability rates. High-quality email service providers take steps to reduce the number of messages they send from being flagged as spam and to ensure ISPs accept and deliver the messages that come from them. These steps include authentication, using a dedicated domain, getting whitelisted by internet service providers and more.
Too Many Emails
People are bombarded with messages every day and that included what’s inside their email inboxes. So, it’s very easy for people to unsubscribe from your email list but think of it this way. They can also easily look away from your print ad, click away from your online ad or throw away your direct mail. With email marketing, you can send highly relevant information- not just promotional messages. Hopefully, interested consumers who might buy one day won’t “unsubscribe” and those who never buy will unsubscribe. As a result, you can invest your time and money in those people who will have the potential to drive revenue for your business in the future.
Time Requirement
If you are computer literate and can write great email marketing messages, then email marketing can be easy. Not only can you set up automated email marketing campaigns that run on autopilot, but you can also create email marketing campaigns any time a new opportunity arises.
However, even though email automation can save you a lot of time, it can also be very time-consuming. Firstly, it takes time to set up everything correctly in your email marketing application, on your website, in your opt-in forms, in your lead pages, in your analytics tools and so on. If you are segmenting your list into smaller groups of people with similar characteristics or behaviours so that you can send them relevant messages, it’s even more time-consuming to set up everything correctly. In addition, this also requires skill and technical know-how.
Required Skills
Many people who don’t have the necessary skill to set up and manage email campaigns and automation in their email marketing applications, have to invest more money to hire someone to do it. If you are one of them, you need to make sure to hire someone who understands the email marketing application you have chosen. While they are all similar, they offer different advanced features that an email marketer might not be familiar with. For example, the advanced segmentation and automation capabilities feature offered by Mailchimp are different from those in ConvertKit.
Conclusion about Email Marketing Pros and Cons
Keeping in mind, all the pros and cons, you can do everything right and still could not get the response you want from your email marketing campaigns. Email marketing is not a once-and-done strategy. That means you need to send useful, meaningful, relevant content to your audience that solves problems, entertains, motivates, and educates them to take some kind of action. However, the pros of Email marketing, certainly outweigh the cons.
That’s all for now, friends. Hope to see you in my next article.