E-Mail Marketing - The Most Effective Marketing Technique
E-mail marketing is a method of direct marketing in which e-mail is used as a medium. Merchants often use this medium to communicate with their customers, keep in touch with them to gain customer loyalty and encourage repeat business. Email marketing is also used to provide some information to prospective customers about the products or services being offered in an effort to persuade them to buy immediately.
There was an expenditure of $400 billion in the United States by various firms in the year 2006 on e-mail marketing and with the number of email users growing at an exponential rate, this form of marketing has become more and more popular. On an average, at least half of the people who use the internet either check or send emails daily. The cost is very little as compared to other forms of communication such as direct mail or printed newsletters being sent by ’snail mail’ to the prospective customers.
E-mail marketing is considered to be the most effective marketing technique after search marketing. With email marketing, estimations of the exact return on investment (ROI) can be made more precisely and are usually quite high. Other than the cost and benefit factor, email is also quick taking only a few seconds to send thousands of emails, while it took at least two to three days to use other modes.
As compared to web based advertising, E-mail marketing has the benefit that it does not wait for the customer to take the initiative. In web site based advertising, the audience has to visit the web site. In email marketing, he will simply get information in his inbox and can quickly follow the directions.
With email marketing, the correlation between marketing effort and sales is easy to track. There are various mechanisms and techniques like bounce messages, unsubscribe requests, read receipts, auto responders, web bugs, click-throughs etc for tracking the users and their activities.
Unsolicited bulk email and genuine user emails are services which allow the users to select some topics of their interests and receive emails on those topics. These are legitimate emails which are sent to the user with consent. Early in the history of the internet, it was not allowed to be used for any commercial purpose. As time passed, it could not be kept for research and educational purposes only. Today, it is widely used commercially.
However, there is a difference between spam and legitimate email marketing, but it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference. Even the spammers make their email look like the legitimate emails. Sometimes, due to receiving too much spam, users often forget the email services they have subscribed for and also report it as spam. According to a survey in mid-2008 by an e-mail services company Return Path the average delivery rate of emails is only 56%; rejected emails were about 20% and 8% emails were filtered away from the inbox. All these things result in a loss for legitimate email marketing.
There is a technique called ‘double opt-in’ which is now used by the legitimate companies. In this technique, when a user subscribes for a service e.g. a newsletter, a confirmation email is sent to that user with a unique code. The user has to open that mail, take the code and then come back to the site to complete the registration process. This confirmation is done by all good and responsible companies before they start sending any information via email to the subscriber.
Used properly, E-mail marketing is both cost effective and can generate legitimate interest in your business.
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