Digital marketing is the method of endorsing and selling any products or services through online marketing channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. Using these online media channels, digital marketing is the method by which companies endorse goods, services and brands.
Nowadays, consumers heavily rely on digital means to search anything online. Engagement through this method forms meaningful interactions with potential and returning customers. Among the other marketing channels, marketers use email marketing as an affordable and an effective tool. Email marketing is a content sharing technique that many ecommerce businesses use. It is usually done through direct mail electronically instead of using the postal service.
Anytime a company sends out an email apart from the registrations, confirmations and direct responses to customer questions, an automated email is generated and that is considered as a form of email marketing. Email marketing is one segment of internet marketing, which encompasses online marketing via blogs, websites, social media pages, discounts and many more. Email marketing can also include newsletters with updates on the company or promotions of sales for the registered customers and subscribers. Marketing emails may also seek customers’ interest by sharing a general message on the company’s behalf such as in the wake of a natural disaster or fraud. This allows businesses to keep their customers informed and tailor their marketing strategies.
Email marketing work is easy to set up which tracks an email marketing campaign, which makes it accessible for small businesses too. One can add a newsletter subscription option to their website and people can subscribe to it. The actual key to successful email marketing is personalization.
Many people believe email marketing is free, starting from scratch and this will return the cost to the company. Here are few advantages of email marketing –
- Build credibility
People do business to gain liking and trust. Email gives the ability to build credibility with audiences by sharing helpful and informative content.
- Generate calls
Email marketing lets businesses reach the right person with the right strategy at the right time.
- Increase donations
As fundraising efforts continue to move online, nonprofits organizations need to adapt their outreach efforts to increase donations through emails.
- Strengthen relationships
If you want to build strong and effective customer relationships, it’s important to have an effective tool to communicate with the people who matter most to your business. Email gives the ability to stay and keep people engaged with your business during your busy season or at slower times of the year.
- Improve communication
Your business depends on having an effective way to communicate with your customers through mailing content. This develops a communication channel with trust.
- Build your brand
With email marketing, you can strengthen brand recognition and position with new and potential clients and this makes you reach more to people when the customer forwards or shares your message with a friend.
- Learn what works
Another benefit of email marketing is that it gives you the metrics you need to see how your campaigns are performing. This helps in forming strategies to work more smartly in the market, and also give you the advantage of better understanding the needs and interests of your customer base.
- Get started quickly
With email marketing software, you’ll have the tools to work on and get started quickly — regardless of the level of marketing experience or expertise. When you get stuck, developing a team of people who are dedicated to your success resolves the problem.
- Reach people on any device
With globalization, email is the simplest and foremost platform, it could be opened on any device, and email marketing is one of the best tools you can use to take advantage of the growing popularity of mobile technology.
- Low costs
One of the most obvious benefits of email marketing is its lower cost as compared to other marketing channels. There are no print or postage costs and no fees paid for exposure through email. Yet it depends upon the content, therefore Email marketers might consider investing in specialist software to automate, track and evaluate their emails.
- Easy to measure
The benefit of email marketing is that it’s easy to measure where the strategy went wrong. Most email marketing software allows tracking statistics, click-through and conversion rates and spotting how a campaign can be improved. These changes can be made almost immediately.
- Easy to share
Subscribers can share the content immediately as they see any brilliant deals and offers to their friends at the click of a button. This type of marketing is the easiest to deal with.
- Easy to get started
Email marketing doesn’t necessarily require a big team to build up an email campaign with fancy templates, videos, images and logos. Yet, some of the most successful campaigns utilize simple text emails, suggesting the most important thing.
Challenges Faced by Email Marketers :-
- Poor Coordination Between Other Departments and Channels
Your customer is present on the omni-channel, therefore brands should also adopt omni-channel strategy. Email marketing can no longer afford to operate just as a single brand. For that matter, all your other channels can’t afford to cooperate either.
- Insufficient Staffing
Nearly, 52% of marketers say their email programs are either inadequate staffed or very under-staffed, according to Litmus research. These programs are fighting a battle, because there’s a strong correlation between staffing along with program success.
- Limitations of Email Service Provider
Marketers have literally listed thousands of email service providers to choose from. Some specialize in particular industry works while others get triggered in email functionality and others on sales-assisted messaging. This turns out to be a loophole.
- Bad Strategy or Leadership
Execution doesn’t work much if you have a poor strategy. More often, a company’s email program is focused on the brand’s needs instead of the customer’s needs, which gets distant in seconds. This approach drives brands to “send another email” to meet the week’s or month’s target, not to truly serve the subscriber.
- Inadequate Tools for the creation of Email Process
Email processing is a complicated process and there are many spots where things can break down. Successful marketers use extensive checklists and create email contents for every email they build at much, much higher rates than less successful programs.
- Lowers the visibility and deliverability of emails.
It’s impossible to know if you’re achieving even well-conceived goals or not through email marketing if you don’t have good metrics.
- Overlapping Issues
Poor leadership can lead to poor coordination across channels and departments in the company. Low integration of visibility into email performance can lead to poorly defined channel goals.
- Lack of Quality Data, Integration
Data integration is already a huge challenge for email marketers, but in the next few years it is going to become the biggest issue that separates world-class marketing organizations from the rest of the pack.
- Security Issue
The information can be easily shared and distributed within a business through email. It does not matter if the email is sent accidentally or without a purpose, the harm is way bigger.
- Impersonal Communication
Sometimes emails are so random that the meaning of the message is often lost in the text. It can make customers or employees forget there are people involved in any marketing strategies which can affect customer service.
- Misunderstanding
Some jargons can lead to conflict in emails. In addition, emails are filled with abbreviations and short descriptions, which can often be misunderstood and interpreted the wrong way. This affects the decrease in marketing and customer retention.
The email marketers should avoid the mistakes that include:
- Over-sending of Emails to the costumer
- Failing to give customers subscription options or services
- Designing and crowding the Email Content, important message gets neglected
- Sending the wrong Remarketing Content
- Skipping the email segmentation
With unparalleled growth in technology, Digital marketing has become one of the most efficient tools of branding and marketing. Almost a hundred percent of the population is connected to the internet these days. At the click of a button, they can take a sneak peek into what you are trying to offer. There are blogs, social media platforms and websites through which one can reach a prospective customer. The email marketing statistics have increased as compared to other digital marketing methods, although it is considered as dead but it isn’t. The companies should remember that this is one of the most important tools to build brand awareness, to keep and resist existing customers and to acquire potential ones. Knowing the cons of email marketing, one makes an informed decision as to how he can take advantage of email marketing while avoiding the potential pitfalls that come with it.
