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The Promise of E-mail Marketing
There is no doubt that e-mail marketing can be an extremely cost-effective market-ing tool and when used properly can significantly improve a company’s bottom line. It can be used in every element of the marketing process, from building the brand, to driving website and store traffic, to marketing special offers and providing customer service or technical support.
E-mail can deliver a number of benefits as part an overall marketing strategy:
- E-mail marketing is less expensive than direct mail. The cost per communication can be as low as 1/10 that of direct mail.
- It provides the means of customizing each message so that the information, promotion or product can be individually personalized or customized.
- It offers marketers instant measurement and response. You can track the results of a campaign in real time, providing instant feedback on its success. This allows marketers to respond to developments as they happen, make changes to the campaign while it is still in progress, and to complete the feedback loop quickly and effectively.
- It can deliver frequency at levels set by the marketer. Daily, weekly or even monthly e-mails can help to keep a brand top of mind.
- E-mail provides massive reach – up to 93 percent of Internet users.
- E-mail offers a low-cost method of conducting research among customers or prospects, and allows researchers to capture results much more quickly and efficiently than traditional methods.
- E-mail has been used to successfully build relationships with a customer base – turning “casual interest” or “no interest” targets into prospects, prospects into customers, and newly acquired customers into repeat customers. One value of e-mail marketing is it has the potential to create an on-going, interactive dialogue with customers that helps them feel emotionally connected to a brand.
Given these advantages over other communications methods, it’s no wonder that many market-ers turned to e-mail as the medium of choice for communicating with their customer base and target prospects. E-mail was perceived as a low-cost, highly efficient way to communicate immediately with massive audiences – or small groups. An ideal medium for companies of virtually any size to promote products and services, gather market data or maintain a dialogue with all of their audiences. E-mail marketing quickly became a mainstay of many companies’ communications programs.
Obstacles with E-mail Marketing
The initial results of e-mail marketing campaigns were staggering. Response rates soared past the best numbers delivered by more traditional media. ROI analyses indicated that the combination of low production and delivery costs combined with higher-than-anticipated response made e-mail one of the most profitable marketing vehicles available.
But as more companies realized the power of e-mail marketing, the market dynamics shifted. More and more companies offered e-mail services – some more legitimate than others. E-mail marketing became subject to abusive tactics – some carryovers from other forms of direct marketing, others newly developed to take advantage of the unique environment within which e-mail operated. The most notorious abuse came to be known as SPAM: unsolicited, unwanted e-mail blasted to millions of recipients, often multiple times, frequently from numerous e-mail servers, in many cases from remote international locations. SPAM has become a major drain on corporate productivity, with office workers spending countless hours sorting through and deleting these annoying e-mails. Industry estimates indicate that in some organizations, over 90 percent of the mail received at the corporate server is spam. This daily chore has so soured many e-mail recipients that they automatically delete any e-mail from a source they’re not familiar with, or not expecting a communiqué from, making it difficult for marketers to break through.
The issue has reached such heights that the government got involved to police e-mail marketing. The result was the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which established requirements and basic parameters for commercial e-mail, outlined consumer rights and assigned penalties to those senders who do not abide by them. While the CAN-SPAM act has helped, it has been most effective in giving generally conscientious U.S.-based companies useful guidelines. It has had a limited effect on companies outside U.S. jurisdiction, or on companies who are dedicated to working around the guidelines in ways that make it difficult to identify and prosecute them.
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