Email Marketing

Email marketing is sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be done to either sold lists or a current customer database. Broadly, the term is usually used to refer to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and adding ads to email messages sent by other companies to their customers.

TYPES

(1) Transactional emails
(2) Direct emails
(3) Mobile email marketing

Advantages

Email marketing is popular with companies for several reasons:

• An exact return on investment can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. Email marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic
• Email marketing is significantly cheaper and faster than traditional mail, mainly because of high cost and time required in a traditional mail campaign for producing the artwork, printing, addressing and mailing.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of email subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive email communications on subjects of interest to them.
• Email provides a cost-effective method to test different marketing content, including visual creative, marketing copy and multimedia assets. The data gathered by testing in the email channel can then be use across all channels of marketing campaigns, both print and digital.
• Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with email blasts that are delivered between 1 am and 5 am local time outperforming those sent at other times in open and click rates.
• If compared to standard email, direct email marketing produces higher response rate and higher average order value for e-commerce businesses.
• Businesses and organizations who send a high volume of emails, utilize an ESP (email service provider) to send, track and utilize information garnered from behaviors related to these emails. Understanding and leveraging consumer behavior through the insights provided by consumer response to email marketing has become an integral facet of the digital marketing landscape.

Disadvantages

As of mid-2016 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 73% in the U.S.; six percent were filtered as spam, and 22% were missing. This lags behind other countries: Australia delivers at 90%, Canada at 89%, Britain at 88%, France at 84%, Germany at 80% and Brazil at 79%.

Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States' Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM),the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.