Pros and Cons of Email Marketing

Emails are a great weapon to personalize your marketing efforts for one-to-one interaction. Recipients of your marketing emails are no random audience, but your leads who have shown interest in your products and services. In such a stage of the buying process, it’s easier to convert them into sales with a little endeavour.

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing where you can send targeted emails tailored to your individual customer preferences. It’s not a discrete step, but a process of walking your customer through your brand personality, mission, products, and promotion. Emails are utilized to personally engage with your individual customers, interact with them, and persuade them to purchase.

Advantages of Email Marketing

Email marketing is an effective method of conveying your brand message to your target customers and influencing their buying decisions through personalized campaigns. It has the following advantages to be incorporated in your marketing strategy.

Marketing automation

You can enjoy the fruit of marketing without even actively performing it. Email marketing software allows you to automate the series of triggered emails and pre-schedule your email campaigns. This organizes your marketing process and maintains consistency in sailing your subscriber through the sales funnel.

Personalization

Email marketing is a highly customized process of acquiring and retaining customers. You can send newsletters and lead magnets tailored to the demographics, preferences, and buying habits of your individual subscribers, so that they find them valuable. The language, the content, and the approach of your emails can also be modified to increase open rates and click-through rates by almost 70%.

A/B testing

Testing your email subject line is crucial to increase its open rate. You can also A/B test your email copy, calls-to-action, images, or infographics to ensure they meet the standard your customer expects, and minimize unsubscriptions.

Real-time marketing

Email marketing gives you the opportunity to trigger your customers with the right marketing approach at the right time. Welcoming your subscribers to your website, or offering them discounts during cart abandonments are great ways of keeping them captured.

Disadvantages of Email Marketing

Despite several pros, email marketing suffers from some limitations that might affect its success rate.

Spamming

Lots of commercial emails end up landing in the spam folder. This is because they have subject lines or content that irritate the recipients. If your emails are not tailored and targeted to your subscriber, or do not provide value, they’re likely to increase unsubscription rates.

Bounce rates

Emails using spam keywords in the subject line or body, like “free”, “money” or “click here”, have a high probability of being filtered out by internet service providers. Also, if you do not refine your mailing list regularly, it will get crammed with inactive email addresses where your messages never reach.

Compatibility

The design and size of your emails are important factors to ensure their smooth access across multiple devices. Emails with too many or high-res images take longer to load and frustrate the customers. Even if you’re sending text-only messages, you must check how it looks on different devices.

Flexibility

Emails are not very versatile platforms where you can play around with your creativity. The types of content that emails can incorporate are restricted to texts and low-resolution visuals which may not serve the purpose of your marketing strategy. Moreover, email content should be short and crisp to hold the attention of its reader, and often lacks opportunity for innovation.

Final Thoughts

Outweighing its disadvantages, email marketing offers you the benefit of reaching your customers personally and convincing them to buy your products. Though emails targeted to B2B and B2C customers are different, their goal to share an emotional attachment remains the same.