Advantages and Disadvantages of Email Marketing

In today's world where a million emails are being sent per second, email marketing has come into existence as the most profitable and most efficient marketing utility which currently exists in the present day world. But just like every other good thing on this earth, this type of marketing has its own disadvantages too. Let us look at both the advantages and disadvantages of email marketing.

Advantages:

Email marketing has a global reach, as it just takes a matter of seconds to reach a person who is on the other end of the world. There are no borders for emails. It is obviously cost effective, as an ad can be sent to 5000 people at the same time with little or no cost compared to sending a paper ad to 5000 people. One can get the picture now of how much time, energy and cost savings is done with the help of email marketing. It also offers a wide variety of innovative ways to win customers with the help of html graphics and videos and popup and flash animations and so on. This opens a wide range of arsenal to the hands of email marketers. An interactive ad is naturally more convincing and attractive rather than a single dimensional ad on paper. Email marketing is also considered to be round the clock marketing, as there is no time limit as to after which you cannot access the target audience. All you have to do is to send the email and rest assured, your customer gets it. Targeted marketing can be done with the help of email marketing as we can decide who sees our ads. This allows spending quality time with people who we may know are genuinely interested in what we have to offer. There are also options for subscribing or unsubscribing to emails if the potential customer is genuinely interested in what we offer. This allows us to efficiently connect with people who are genuinely interested in our products. Faster response times and the simplicity of the whole concept of email marketing make it a very powerful tool.

Disadvantages:

Email marketing if used unwisely, can prove disastrous as not many people like to see spam mail in their inbox the first thing they log in. The email spamming these days has increased to such an extent that nowadays it is hard to differentiate between spam mail and legitimate email. Such is the extent of bulk email spamming happening these days. In the year 2003, an Act was passed called the CAN-SPAM act which imposes a fine of 11,000 $ per violation on the subject of spam mail. So in order to avoid paying such a huge amount, companies these days have their own employees checking to make sure that they do not end up sending spam mails to their customers. However, there are lots of violations of this act in the business and no one takes the time to file a complaint, as it is easier to delete a mail rather than make a case out of it.

All in all, made use of in a proper fashion, email marketing has the potential to be one of the strongest crowd pullers in the field. It has the world itself as a reach and that is something which cannot be taken slightly.