Marketing is crucial for generating sales and building relationships with existing and potential customers. In addition, it is an effective way to promote your brand, products, and services if done right. Those days are gone when the sole purpose of sending emails was communication. Instead, emails have evolved into a fast, cost-effective, and flexible way of marketing. The benefits of email marketing have made it an ideal choice for online businesses to send targeted marketing campaigns to their customers. However, like any other marketing channel, there are pros and cons of email marketing. This article is specifically for those interested in knowing the pros and cons of email marketing to help assess how their business can benefit from it.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a marketing strategy in which you send commercial emails to potential and existing customers:

1. To build awareness regarding the business and its products or services. 
2. Encouraging them to take the desired action, such as purchasing a product.
3. To keep them informed of new products, services, or promotions.
4. To communicate the latest news, articles, or updates.

1978 marks the first incident of the marketing email, which led to sales worth $13 million. Since then, businesses have used emails to promote their products and services. As a result, email marketing has become a successful way to gain and retain customers.

Benefits of Email Marketing

Although there are both pros and cons of email marketing, the advantages are far more than its drawbacks, some of which are:

1. Cost-Effective Marketing

Among the benefits of email marketing is its cost-effectiveness. The mainstream marketing channels, such as print and electronic media, involve hefty marketing costs. Advertisements on billboards also require you to invest a tremendous amount of money. On the other hand, email marketing may only need you to invest in specialized software or tool for automating, tracking, and measuring marketing campaigns. Then, you can reach out to all subscribers with a single email. ActiveCampaign, Getresponse, Brevo(formerly Sendinblue), ConvertKit, AWeber, and Constant Contact are some of the most famous email marketing tools used effectively for marketing campaigns.

2. Easy to Implement

You do not need a skill set to design appealing email content, making email marketing easy to implement. Most popular email marketing tools offer drag-and-drop editors to create email campaigns. Therefore, if you use an email marketing tool or platform, you can create versatile and stunning email campaigns in minimum time. Moreover, testing and launching an email campaign is easy which you can do in real-time.

3. Easy to Schedule

Email marketing allows businesses to decide when to send marketing campaigns. You can schedule your marketing campaigns in advance, and emails will go out as per plan. In other words, with email marketing, you can automate your campaigns, and emails will go out automatically at the scheduled time. 

4. Personalized Marketing Campaigns

Although email marketing has many benefits, personalized marketing campaigns make it the perfect choice for online businesses. You can address the email recipient by name to make the marketing campaigns personalized. Addressing the recipients by their first name increases their engagement, making them more likely to respond to the message.

In addition, customized messages recipients feel the message is specifically tailored for them. In contrast, you cannot personalize TV or billboard advertisements.

5. Tailored Messages

Email marketing allows you to tailor your campaigns to the target audience’s needs. Most email marketing tools, such as ActiveCampaign, Getresponse, Brevo(formerly Sendinblue), ConvertKit, AWeber, and Constant Contact, enable you to segment your subscribers based on specific criteria, such as their behavior or interests. Segmentation is essential to ensure you send only relevant emails to your audiences.

For example, if your brand has an offer for females only, you can send emails only to females. Or, if you have a promotion in a particular area, you can tailor your email campaign to target only the people of that area. Therefore, email marketing allows you to send the correct marketing email to the right people, increasing effectiveness.

6. Increases Brand Awareness

Regular emails with a consistent tone and color scheme can leave a long-lasting impact on the minds of your audience. Having an appealing color scheme per your brand can significantly increase brand awareness. Frequent emails will form an impression on recipients’ minds. They will become familiar with your brand, creating a connection.

7. Improves Relationships with Customers

Consistent and valuable emails help businesses build relationships with their customers and subscribers. They will know more about your brand and services. Through special offers, you can show them how you value your customers. As a result, they will feel connected, and your relationship will strengthen.

8. Real-Time Communication with Quick Results

Businesses can create and send emails in real-time to communicate any last-minute offers, deals, or promotions. You can also remind your customers to take advantage of every promotion that is about to start. In short, email marketing enables businesses to send timely marketing campaigns, an advantage you cannot get from traditional marketing channels such as TV or billboard advertisements.

Moreover, you can quickly assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and take action for better results. Unlike print or broadcast advertising, you can take immediate measures to improve your campaign.

9. Improve Sales and Generates Revenue

Email marketing can tempt its recipients to take immediate action in response to a promotion or offer with the help of CTA. Therefore, CTA (call-to-action) is included at the end of the emails, making the purchase process quicker and increasing sales.

10. Automation Converts Abandoned Carts into Successful Orders

It is common for customers to add items to a cart but not complete the purchase. Shoppers can abandon their cart for several reasons, most of which are addressable. You can tempt the customer to return to the site and complete the purchase with automated emails. An automatic email reminder will likely convert an abandoned cart into a successful order.

11. Extensive Global Reach

Extensive global reach is one of the top-ranked benefits of email marketing. Every business desires to expand worldwide to increase its revenue and profitability. If you have a company catering to customers worldwide, email marketing is the perfect choice for you.

Traditional marketing channels cannot deliver your message to audiences in different countries. While with email marketing, you can reach out to a broader base of audiences worldwide.

12. Increases Traffic to Your Website

Email marketing is an effective way to increase traffic to your website. For example, if a blogger promotes content through emails, they can include a link to drive traffic to their blog. Email marketing may also improve your SEO by sending traffic to your website. Increased traffic to a blog or website benefits businesses in several ways, such as more backlinks, higher ranking in SERPs, higher conversion rates, and increased backlinks. 

13. Easy to Track and Measure Marketing Campaigns

Evaluating the effectiveness of marketing campaigns to increase return on investment is critical. Using an email marketing tool, you can measure how many people opened or clicked through the email content. These statistics help businesses change their marketing strategy to know where the campaign went wrong and adjust it accordingly. Tracking and measuring the marketing campaigns helps increase conversions and sales by focusing on successful campaigns and changing those not-so-successful. You can also track the unsubscribe rate to know which campaigns are causing recipients to unsubscribe.

14. Allows Follow-Ups

New subscribers or purchasers may forget about the business or lose interest if they do not hear from the brand. Worse, they may even switch to one of the competitors. Therefore, after customers have purchased, it is critical to let them know they are valuable to your business.

Most customers are ok with hearing from the brand. It is a brilliant strategy to help customers convert into loyal ones. Email marketing allows businesses to schedule follow-up emails sent at regular intervals. The follow-up emails may contain product care guides, upsells, or recommendations based on the purchase. As a result, the customers will keep coming back for further purchases. Returning customers are likely to promote your brand.

15. Collect Surveys and Feedback

Customer feedback and surveys are essential to enhance user experience and improve marketing campaigns. Email marketing allows businesses to collect customer feedback regarding campaigns, offers, promotions, etc. They can even conduct surveys to tailor their upcoming campaigns better. Unlike traditional methods for collecting feedback and conducting surveys, email marketing can give results in real-time, saving time.

16. Shareable

Email campaigns are straightforward to share with friends, family, and colleagues. However, you must include social sharing and email sharing buttons at the bottom of the emails. Social and email sharing buttons enable your recipient to share their favorite content, attractive deals, or promotions with no hassle. As a result, shareable marketing campaigns increase your reach and improve lead generation.

17. Environment Friendly

With the growing concern over practices that harm our environment and planet, switching to environmentally friendly alternatives is critical. Email marketing does not involve printing, paper, or plastics, making it an environment-friendly choice.

18. Versatility

Having the ability to include a range of content types in emails makes email marketing versatile. Emails can comprise plain text, images, videos, or files according to your needs. The choice of email content depends on your target audience and the marketing campaign’s purpose. For example, if you intend to introduce a product, you can include catchy graphics to attract customers.

Drawbacks of Email Marketing

As I said earlier, email marketing has both pros and cons. Although the benefits of email marketing make it an excellent choice for online businesses, it has certain limitations. However, if you have the right strategy and content, you can overcome those limitations and fully benefit from email marketing campaigns.

Following are a few of the disadvantages of email marketing:

1. Often Marked as Spam

Since most businesses use email marketing, your emails might get marked as spam if you send them too often. Customers will only open your emails if they believe you have something valuable to offer. Therefore, choosing the right frequency and timing of emails can be tricky. 

2. Difficult to Gain Attention

Commonly, a good percentage of your recipients may not even open your emails.  However, tracking and measuring your email campaigns enable you to determine what needs to be changed and how to engage audiences better. Unfortunately, despite all your efforts, some of your recipients may not open your emails, which you cannot help.

3.  Requires to Follow International Laws

If you are targeting an international audience, you must be aware of international laws, such as GDPR, to avoid adverse consequences. Not following international laws can result in severe penalties.

Therefore, make sure you follow international laws and ensure your privacy policy clearly states how you use the personal information of individuals and how they can choose not to receive any marketing communication. Additionally, you must include an unsubscribe button at the top or bottom of your every email so that those who wish to unsubscribe can easily do so.

4. Oversized Email May Cause The Audience to Lose Interest

Your emails must not be large enough to cause loading delays. If an email does not load quickly, your audience will lose interest and abandon it. Most subscribers access their emails on mobile devices, and because of data usage limitations, they may disable images on their devices. It is, therefore, critical to include only relevant content and graphics.

5. Design Issues

The design and content of an email play a critical role in the success of an email campaign. Your email design must be responsive and display correctly on every device, regardless of screen size. If it is not responsive, the content and images may appear distorted. Therefore, you may be required to invest in tools that ensure your emails are customized for all platforms.

6. Hurried Emails Can Negatively Affect Your Brand’s Image

Emails are easy to create, and you can send them in real time, but you must ensure the content does not have grammatical or spelling mistakes. Hurried emails with grammatical or other errors will offend your customers and affect your brand image.

7. You Can Only Target Who are Already Aware of Your Brand

Various international laws have made it mandatory that people subscribe to your email list with their will. As a result, you can only target those who have agreed to receive marketing communication from you. In other words, through email marketing, you can only target those who know your brand and have opted to receive emails from you.

Conclusion

Businesses utilize email marketing to grow their business and increase revenue. However, email marketing has pros and cons, like any other marketing channel. It is easy to implement, track, and measure. However, although it is an effective way to promote your business, it may only sometimes work. Despite having the right strategy, great content, and appealing design, you may need help to gain your recipients’ attention.