E-mail marketing is the act of sending commercial messages to a group of people via email. It is an effective marketing tool for businesses and allows you to build direct communication between a business, company or potential customers. It is cheaper and faster than traditional mail because most of the cost falls on the recipient with email. Whenever you invest in a marketing strategy, you want it to deliver a solid return and the research have conveyed that with every dollar we spend on email marketing, the return could be expected more than 70% and 99% of the personal consumers check their email every day. In the era of different digital marketing channels, email marketing is one the oldest form of digital marketing.
Regardless of how email marketing has evolved rapidly in the 21st century and is an effective means of communicating with consumers, in the 1990s the consumers began referring to it as spam and began blocking content from emails with blocking programs and filters so the marketers had to develop a way of pushing the content through to the end-user without being cut out automatically by any filter and software that remove spams to effectively communicate a message through email.
Misconceptions About Email Marketing
- Highly Expensive: Email marketing is cost-effective and is a highly profitable solution. It is less expensive than traditional print mail outs.
- Have to be highly designed: The emails with lots of design elements experience hindrances that your basic HTML an email with logo in the header and the picture of the product that you are promoting and the consumer when receiving plain email they don’t feel they are being marketed.
- No success-proven: It is a misconception that there is no proof that email campaigns work but email marketing is one of the most effective methods that provide you to do research and develop your inbound marketing strategy.
- People on your Opt-in list wants to hear from you: You generate emails through Opts but not everybody you receivers opt wants to hear you. At one time they think that they need your content but loses interest afterwards. That’s why relying on the unsubscribes is worthless, you also have to look at the email engagements.
- Open rates are an important metric in email marketing: This doesn’t mean that it is useless, but sometimes the email open rate metric ESPs display is misleading. Email open rates are unreliable as all your recipients using Outlook have an image that is blocked by default and the email being opened is indicated by the image in the email being downloaded, which means that the open rate isn’t trading accurately. As image blocking is coming to be more common and mobile devices often default to a text format for an email in which images are downloaded automatically and it leads to a reduction in open rate. It’s better to look at click-through rates on your email call to action and the leads generated from the email send.