With over four billion email users worldwide, it is no surprise that email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing strategies. But instead of spending countless hours sending individual emails whenever you have news, bulk email marketing allows you to send emails to a group of people at once. This cuts down on time spent sending emails and helps you get your message out there cheaper and quicker.
That said, what are the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing? In this article, we will highlight the pros and cons of email marketing to show you why 87% of marketers still depend on it.
What are Email Marketing and Bulk Email Marketing Campaigns?
Email marketing is a form of digital marketing where marketers send targeted messages to segmented audiences. A bulk email marketing campaign involves sending the same message or similar messages to a large group of people.
Generally, email marketing can be used to accomplish a variety of business objectives, including:
- Building relationships with current and potential customers
- Convincing potential customers to purchase a product or service
- Encouraging brand loyalty by building trust with your customers
With that out of the way, what are the advantages of email marketing? Well, businesses may use this approach to increase sales, drive customer engagement, and build long-lasting relationships with customers.
But, there’s more.
Pros of Email Marketing
It’s no secret that email still remains one of the most effective ways to connect with potential customers and drive sales since, after all these years – we’ve all read the stories. And if you’re still not convinced, perhaps these pros of email marketing will change your mind.
Lower Costs
Lower costs is one of the many advantages of email marketing campaigns. Businesses can spend as little as $10 on bulk email campaigns. This is by far cheaper than Google and Facebook ads ranging at over $1000 a month. Furthermore, bulk email marketing demands little investment:
- A computer/smartphone/tablet
- An internet connection
- A subscription with a bulk email sender
Customer Feedback
Bulk email marketing service providers enable businesses to reach large audiences with a single message. Bigger audiences often mean more feedback. With more surveys, feedback forms, and review requests going out to more customers via bulk mail, it’s easy to collect tons of valuable feedback and see your business from the customer’s point of view.
Additional Sales Channel
Email marketing is yet another sales channel, just like social media, etc. Marketers are able to drive more sales by reaching out to potential customers with new offers, proposals, deals, flash sales, and more.
High ROI
Every dollar spent on email marketing gives back an ROI of $36. Put this together with the low cost of running a bulk email marketing campaign, and the result is a low-cost marketing channel with high returns. In short, we can conclude that bulk email marketing is cheaper than other marketing channels e.g., social media, paid ads, and traditional direct mail, among others.
Personalization
Although hundreds of emails go out to hundreds of customers in marketing campaigns, there’s still room to personalize your message for maximum impact.
Email marketing offers extensive personalization capabilities from unique content, images and videos, personalized offers, and so much more. Marketers collect data from website analytics tools and other forms filled by the user.
Increase Website Traffic
Sending out regular emails about new products or services gives potential customers something to look forward to from you. It also helps them remember who you are when they might need your product or service again in the future.
Email marketing can be used to:
- Announce new products, services, or business partnerships
- Thank customers for buying from you
- Or simply to provide information about your products and services.
Automation Capabilities
Bulk email marketing can be a scary endeavor for many, but when done right, it can help your business save time and money, avoid certain mistakes, and even make you more money. What automation features are we talking about?
- Sending automatic follow-up emails to customers that recently bought items
- Drafting and saving templates directly on your email sending program
- Automatically sending emails to new registrations on your website
As an email marketer, you probably have a lengthy to-do list. There are so many tasks that need your attention and time — like creating dynamic email templates, segmenting your subscriber lists, testing different subject lines and keywords, and much more. Bulk email automation is here to help.
Lead Generation
Email lead generation involves creating marketing lists with the primary objective of attracting new customers and generating leads.
There are numerous ways to generate leads through email, but these three methods are some of the most successful and effective:
- Building your own email list by scouring the internet with your email scraper
- Partnering with third-party vendors that can send emails on your behalf, and
- Partnering with another company to grow your list
Build Trust and Relationships
Every marketer wants to build trust and long-lasting relationships with customers. Sending emails and keeping in touch with customers consistently helps build trust as well as nurture relationships with clients.
Promote Products and Services
Email marketing can be useful for promoting your business and getting customers hyped up about your product or service. After all, who doesn’t love promotional emails with special offers and coupons? The real challenge is getting recipients to open, read and respond to your emails.
Easy to Share
Creating and sharing content messages via email is easy. There’s no technical knowledge and no learning curve for absolute beginners.
Obtain a Wider Reach
Bulk emails can reach the inboxes of a larger customer audience in just one click. These emails can be sent and received locally or globally, no matter where the recipient is.
Emails also work on multiple devices, from mobile phones to desktops, laptops, and tablets.
Deliver Target Message
Bulk email marketing strategies are heavily centered around carefully curated email lists. This means that the message will almost always reach the right person. Be sure to clean up your mailing list every once in a while to avoid sending emails to uninterested people.
Derive Better Insights
Marketers can derive clearer insight into the effectiveness of their campaigns through advanced tracking. There is a variety of software for mailing lists that make it easy to track the number of opens and clicks, unsubscribes, and response rates, among other metrics.
These metrics are useful in measuring the success of your marketing campaigns. For instance, an increase in the number of unsubscribers could indicate that your content needs improvement.
Consolidate Your Brand Identity
Sending emails to your customers consistently helps them familiarize themselves with your brand and, as a result, keeps them connected to you. Think about a time you thought of buying a product. The first brand that came to mind was the one you were comfortable buying from.
Cons of Email Marketing
The advantages of using email marketing are endless. But just like any other type of marketing strategy, there are risks you need to be aware of before getting started with bulk email marketing.
High Risk of Getting Flagged as Spam
Anyone can launch a bulk email campaign and send thousands of emails in the hope of reaching their targets. However, spam is a big problem for email marketers, not something you want to be associated with your brand.
Spamming can damage your brand reputation and could lead to a loss of customers. Spam detectors take actions such as sending emails to the wrong recipients or emails being marked as spam to be outright suspicious.
That’s why you should:
- Always ask for the recipient’s consent before sending emails
- Verify the provided emails with an email bulk verifier tool
Once you get their permission, provide valuable content to keep your recipients engaged.
Lesser Scope for Formatting and Optimization
Many marketers shy away from bulk email marketing as they feel it lacks creativity and individuality. It requires a lot of time and effort to plan, create, and optimize bulk emails. And since each email goes out to a segmented group of recipients at the end of the day, creating personalized messages for each individual recipient is virtually near impossible.
Undelivered Emails
Email marketers have definitely experienced the issues of undelivered emails. One of the causes of undelivered emails is customers switching to new email addresses. Marketers may not know that a customer is no longer using their old email address and end up sending emails that fail to reach the target audience.
Unopened Emails
It’s highly likely that not all recipients will open your email. After all, email only sees a 29% open rate across all industries.
Sometimes people may forget to open the emails you send them because they are too busy. What’s more, your customers’ inboxes are already flooded with tons of emails from other businesses.
Email Regulations Issues for International Customers
Various countries impose commercial communication laws differently – some strict, others flexible. Some laws are difficult to comply with depending on where your customers live. For instance, it is legal to send unsolicited commercial emails in the US, but this must be done in adherence with the CAN-SPAM Act.
In the UK, businesses need permission to send commercial emails to their customers as held by the GPDR.
Design Issues on Different Devices
Email subscribers use different devices to view their email, such as laptops, smartphones, etc. Sometimes, however, emails may fail to appear as intended on particular devices interfering with the effectiveness of the message.
Email Marketing Requires Some Copywriting and Design Skills
In order to write convincing sales copies of your email messages, you need to possess some good copywriting skills. Companies that lack these skills often hire a skilled copywriter.
Design skills are also important. Well-designed templates have more impact than bland templates with text as the only medium of communication. In cases where you or your team lacks the designing skills, you may need to outsource the services to skilled designers.
Wrapping It Up
If you’re looking for email marketing advantages and disadvantages, we hope that this article has provided all the information you need.
For marketing professionals aiming to find the most effective way to reach as many potential customers as possible, bulk email marketing might seem like an obvious answer. However, while some might see it as an easy solution, bulk email marketing is not without its risks.
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