Email marketing involves sending marketing messages directly to potential customers. Emails are sent to a specific list of recipients to promote or sell products/services made by a company. It is considered as one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest marketing methods. Unfortunately, like any other marketing strategy, email marketing also has its own advantages and disadvantages. The following are some of the pros and cons for small businesses.
Advantages of email marketing
Small businesses should consider email marketing for many reasons. Through email marketing, they can promote a product/service directly to a group of people. Not only will you develop your business opportunity, but you will also generate good sales revenue at minimal cost.
The following are some very good reasons for small businesses to consider email marketing:
• Easy to use – It’s very easy and simple to use as you can instant message thousands of potential customers at any time. All you need is the list of email IDs of targeted and potential customers to distribute information about your business. Save a lot of time.
• Time and cost effectiveness – Email is a cost-effective business communication tool compared to other marketing methods. In today’s competitive world, to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to adopt email marketing strategies as it takes less time to build awareness of your business and is also cost effective.
• Personalized promotion: As already mentioned, it allows you to personally send a promotional message from a company to the potential customer. This helps establish a relationship between the company and the client by encouraging direct and direct communication between the two parties; while a business can personalize its message to various selected categories of potential customers, customers can give feedback/response directly in the message via email.
• Segment Based Marketing – One of the best things about email marketing is segmentation. You can segment your list based on potential group and tailor your messages to those groups, this helps you target a specific group of audience and also increases the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. By segmenting your email list, recipients will appreciate receiving messages that are relevant and useful to them.
• Trackable Sales and User Engagement – Another benefit of email marketing is that the sender can track the sales generated by email marketing. Thus, if a user purchases the product/service from the link provided in the email, it can be tracked on the sender’s server.
Similarly, it is also possible for the email marketer to know how many email recipients have clicked on the link, how many clicked but did not purchase, and how many skipped the email outright. In this way, the marketer can review the email strategies and find the loopholes and eliminate them to make the marketing more effective.
Disadvantages of email marketing and how to avoid them
Unfortunately, email marketing has certain disadvantages and the biggest disadvantage is spam. Let us now analyze the disadvantages of email marketing.
• Emails can be considered spam/junk – Many people believe that marketing emails sent to them are spam and junk, can contain viruses and, if opened, can seriously affect your computer. Also, if the information provided in the email is not relevant, the recipient is likely to delete your message. Therefore, while emailing potential customers, provide genuine addresses and business contacts, so they trust your business.
• Engaging customers is complicated: Keeping customers actively involved in your business for a long time is very difficult. Initially, when customers receive emails from your business, they tend to show interest, but over time, they get bored of your messages and you eventually lose a loyal customer. Therefore, a good subject line and text about your business are essential to attract customer attention for a long period of time.
• Browser Compatibility Issues: Adapting a site to be browser friendly is a major issue, as some issues can arise when sending image and video emails to customers. If the customer encounters problems opening the mail, they will never return to your website. Therefore, avoid images and videos in your emails as much as possible as it could affect your business.
• Disorganized email campaign – Bad and disorganized email campaigns can leave your potential audience confused. You must follow a clearly defined strategy when sending messages to customers. It’s always best to segregate customers who are likely to be interested in your product/service and only message them. This shows professionalism in your business.
Hire an email marketing specialist
Given the pros and cons for small businesses, it’s quite sensible to hire an email marketer as they know the job well and will create relevant and valuable emails that will attract and target potential customers. Email marketers conduct a thorough survey of your business and will work closely to promote it.